Charlie Hebdo is a French satirical magazine with a strong record of satirizing many religious figures, and for years Islam’s prophet Muhammad has been included among the subjects of the satirical cartoons. For the folks working there, death threats from people claiming to be Muslims were not unusual, and a firebomb destroyed its old offices in November 2011, the day after the magazine had announced that it had selected Muhammad as its editor-in-chief.

On January 7, 2015 two gunmen, brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi, went into the magazine’s offices and gunned down eleven people, including a police officer. The gunmen then killed another police officer outside the offices. It seemed that within minutes of the massacre, pundits and members of the media went into overdrive trying to keep Islam out of the picture; we were assured that the “religion of peace” had nothing to do with this. This was in spite of the facts that the two gunmen were Muslims yelling Allahu Akbar, and were heard shouting in French, “We have killed Charlie Hebdo. We have avenged the Prophet Mohammad.”

The disturbing reality is that Islam had everything to do with it. Satirizing and drawing pictures of Muhammad goes against 33:57 of the Koran, which states that those who “annoy” Muhammad would be cursed by Allah:

Verily, those who annoy Allah and His Messenger, Allah has cursed them in this world and in the Hereafter, and has prepared for them a humiliating torment.

The authoritative Muslim scholar Ibn Kathir explained this verse:

Here, Allah warns and threatens those who annoy Him by going against His commands and doing that which He has forbidden, and who persist in doing so, and those who annoy His Messenger by accusing him of having faults or shortcomings – Allah forbid. ‘Ikrimah said that the Ayah [verse]: Verily, those who annoy Allah and His Messenger, was revealed concerning those who make pictures or images [my emphasis]…The Ayah appears to be general in meaning and to apply to all those who annoy him [Muhammad] in any way, because whoever annoys him annoys Allah, just as whoever obeys him obeys Allah.

So the satirical cartoons were not only “annoying” Muhammad, they were also “annoying” Allah. This was sheer blasphemy. What were the two brothers to do?

Said and Cherif apparently looked to the teachings and examples of Muhammad. Muhammad had personally ordered the killing of four specific individuals whose only crime was that they had criticized him and/or Islam (‘Asma’ Bint Marwan, Abu ‘Afak, Ka’b bin Al-Ashraf, and Abu Rafi’). And Muhammad had even given retroactive approval to the separate killings by Muslims of three individuals who had criticized him and/or Islam. That the brothers had learned from Muhammad’s example was shown in Cherif’s January 9th statement to Igor Sahiri, a journalist for France’s BFMTV:

We defend the prophet. If someone offends the prophet then there is no problem, we can kill him.

So the Muslim brothers were simply following the commands of Allah in the Koran, and the teachings and examples of Muhammad when they committed the massacre.

Some have claimed that Islam had nothing to do with the massacre because the gunmen also killed two Muslims. The first was Moustapha Ourrad, a copy editor for the magazine. However, Ourrad’s involvement in satirizing and creating pictures of Muhammad meant that he was going against the commands of Allah and the teachings of Muhammad; Ourrad had therefore left Islam and was an apostate. Islamic doctrine commands that apostates be killed. And this is even assuming the gunmen knew Ourrad was a Muslim, for which there is no evidence. The second Muslim killed by the gunmen was a police officer named Ahmed Merabet. He was executed outside the office building. However, there is no evidence that he had identified himself as a Muslim to the gunmen. So the claim that the gunmen knowingly shot two Muslims is baseless.

The Islamic teachings about being killed as a martyr and being rewarded in paradise for doing so were influential on the two gunmen. On January 9th, after they were surrounded by French security forces, the brothers reportedly said they wanted “to die as martyrs.” In fact, a few years earlier, in December 2007, Cherif had stated in a court deposition that

“the wise leaders in Islam told him and his friends that if they die as martyrs in jihad they would go to heaven” and “that martyrs would be greeted by more than 60 virgins in a big palace in heaven.”

These “wise leaders in Islam” had it right. Islamic doctrine teaches that the only guaranteed way for a Muslim to get into paradise is to die as a martyr fighting in the cause of Allah (jihad); this is based on 9:111 of the Koran:

Verily, Allah has purchased of the believers their lives and their properties for (the price) that theirs shall be Paradise. They fight in Allah’s Cause, so they kill (others) and are killed…

But Cherif potentially shortchanged himself in the number of virgins, because Muhammad had promised 72 virgins to the Muslim who died fighting in Allah’s Cause:

Al-Miqdam bin Ma’diykarib narrated that the Messenger of Allah said: “There are six things with Allah for the martyr: He is forgiven with the first flow of blood (he suffers), he is shown his place in Paradise, he is protected from punishment in the grave, secured from the greatest terror, the crown of dignity is placed upon his head – and its gems are better than the world and what is in it – he is married to seventy-two wives among Al-Huril-’Ayn of Paradise, and he may intercede for seventy of his close relatives.”

The massacre at the Charlie Hebdo offices was not committed by Islamists following a belief system called Islamism; the massacre was carried out by two Muslim brothers who were following the teachings and examples of Muhammad, and the commands of Allah found in the Koran. Islam killed Charlie Hebdo and avenged Muhammad.

It used to be that the media would at least wait a day before sweeping the latest victims of Muslim terrorism into the trash to refocus on the looming “anti-Muslim backlash” that never actually comes.

The increase in Muslim terrorism however has made it risky for the media to wait that long. 24 hours after a brutal Muslim terrorist attack, there might be another brutal Muslim terrorist attack which will completely crowd out the stories of Muslims worrying about the backlash to the latest Muslim atrocity.

The massacre at Charlie Hebdo was quickly followed by a massacre at a kosher supermarket and somewhere in between them the Islamic State in Nigeria had wiped out the populations of sixteen villages.

With so many Muslim attacks crowded together, the media had no choice but to take a deep breath and dive in with its “Muslim backlash” stories.

The Voice of America ran its “Muslims fear backlash” piece while the bodies were still warm. The Los Angeles Times rushed out its “Muslims fear backlash” story before the Kosher supermarket massacre. It quoted the Muslim spokesman for the National Observatory Against Islamophobia asserting that it is Muslims who suffer after such attacks. Muslims however weren’t the ones who suffered. The four dead Jews at a Kosher supermarket did the suffering at the hands of a Muslim gunman.

While Muslim murderers were still prowling France for victims, the media was making the story about the perpetrators, not the victims.

And Muslims around the world lined up to join the “Fear of a Backlash” party like it was an exclusive nightclub. Both Belgian and Swedish Muslims claimed to be afraid of a backlash after the Paris attacks. At least those Swedish Muslims who weren’t calling for Allah to “multiply such attacks.”

Even Detroit Muslims got in on the act. Dawud Walid, executive director of CAIR in Michigan, claimed, “We are concerned about backlash against Muslims in the west.”

Walid had endorsed the historical Islamic mass murder of Jews on Twitter and stated in a sermon, “Who are those who incurred the wrath of Allah? They are the Jews, they are the Jews.”

Even while Jews were set to be murdered by a fellow exponent of Walid’s anti-Semitic ideology, the media was pandering to his phony claims of victimization thousands of miles away.

The Muslim backlash narrative insisted that the real victims weren’t Yohan Cohen, Yoav Hattab, Philippe Braham and Francois-Michel Saada dying in a Kosher supermarket in France, but Dawud Walid, the anti-Semitic spokesman for a hate group closely linked to terrorism over in Michigan.

Is it really a backlash that Muslims fear or a moral reckoning?

In the rush to make bigots like Walid the victims, instead of the actual men and women being murdered in the name of his violent ideology, the hard questions about the connection between the historical Islamic anti-Semitism bandied about by Dawud Walid and the modern massacres of Jews go unasked.

The murder of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists had its roots in an Islamic political and legal tradition of punishing blasphemy that has continued uninterrupted for over a thousand years. The murder of four Jews in a Kosher supermarket was part of a great Islamic tradition that began with Mohammed. The defenders of the “Prophet” began by killing blasphemers and then continued his work by killing Jews.

Muslims are not the victims of the Hebdo massacre. They are not the victims of mass murder in a Kosher supermarket. They are not the victims of the Sydney Siege.

They are the perpetrators.

When the media rushes to print interviews with Muslims claiming to suddenly be terrified of an imaginary backlash, it is marginalizing and silencing the real victims of Muslim violence who have been the subjects of a Muslim assault for over a thousand years complete with literal lashings.

Not every Muslim supports what happened, but the history and theology of Islam support the ends of silencing blasphemers and killing Jews, if not necessarily the provocative individual means.

The root cause of Islamic violence is Islam. Everything else, from poverty to YouTube videos, is subsidiary at best.

The cries of “Islamophobia” and the claims of a backlash silence the victims of Muslim terror and encourage social blindness to the next Muslim attack against Jews, Christians, Atheists, Hindus, Buddhists and countless others.

The Muslim backlash story is a great media tradition that dates back to at least September 11. While the streets of downtown Manhattan were still streaked with the ashes of the dead, the media began running stories about Muslims who were changing their clothes and putting up American flags out of fear that the maddened patriotic rabble would shortly begin massacring Muslims.

The mass anti-Muslim riots after September 11 never materialized; just as they never materialized after the Sydney Siege in Australia or the latest Muslim massacres in France.

The worst thing the media came up with in Australia, after touting its phony #Illridewithyou hashtag warning that Muslims were being persecuted, was three men and one woman holding up a sign reading, “Death to ISIS; Get Out You Rag-Headed F___s.”

They were immediately interviewed by police on possible charges of Isisphobia.

If the police had been as assertive in going after every Muslim in Australia waving a “Behead all those who insult the Prophet” sign, Australia would have been a lot safer.

And if the Australian media had been as aggressive in going after Sheikh Monis, as it did after a few young men waving Australian flags on a shopping center roof, the murder of two Australians in a café might not have happened.

But instead of fighting Jihadists, the media and politicians are determined to fight the threat of a backlash to Muslim terrorism. The obsession with the backlash however implicitly admits the existence of Islamic terror and sidelines it to instead focus on the reaction to it as the greater threat.

On one side are bodies heaped across Europe and America. On the other is the occasional slice of pork on a mosque door, a little graffiti scrawled on a wall or a dirty look on public transportation.

One is genocide and the other is petty vandalism.

We don’t need any more earnest interviews in which Muslims claim that they are the real victims of Muslim terrorism because they now feel “unwelcome” when the bodies of non-Muslims still lie in the morgue.

Try comparing an “unwelcome” feeling to being dead.

It is that sense of self-pitying Muslim victimization that leads easily to Muslim violence. Violence is often sanctioned by victimhood. That Muslims believe themselves to be the victims is nothing new. The Nazis also believed that they were the victims. So did the Muslim killer in a Kosher supermarket who claimed that ISIS, with its mass rapes and genocidal campaign, was the victim of French intervention.

If European Muslims really want to end atrocities like the ones that took place in Paris, instead of making themselves into the victims, they should examine the complicity of their religion, their politics and their sense of victimization in perpetrating them.

I think Sisi's speech is of course courageous and important - HOWEVER - Christians continue to be slaughtered in Egypt with impunity. The government there is doing NOTHING to stop this. Note also that Western media - particularly in the U.S. - with the exception of Fox News Channel - is NOT embracing Sisi's message. Words are worth exactly what they cost. ACTIONS are what matter - and I see no constructive action on the part of this administration, or European leaders - only empty words.

[David Horowitz’s new book, The Great Betrayal, was recently published by Regnery and is available at Frontpage.]

The Islamic terror attack on the magazine Charlie Hebdo was carried out by Muslim criminals who were apparently trained in Yemen. Meanwhile, national security officials are warning of an imminent threat to Europe and the United States from jihadi soldiers who are returning from the wars in Syria and Iraq. According to the head of the FBI and other first responders there is no way to stop their re-entry because, after all, they have American passports. Nor is there any way to stop them in Syria and Iraq since Obama has surrendered both countries to our enemies. The Democratic mayor of New York — ground zero for the Islamic War — has even stopped the surveillance of jihadi mosques, the breeding grounds for domestic “lone wolves.” And with our southern border shredded by Obama and the Democrats it’s not going to be difficult even for foreign jihadis to get to their infidel targets. Of course, Obama doesn’t like the word “terror” to begin with, let alone “Islamic terror.” Thanks to him, the Islamic war against the United States is officially referred to as an “overseas contingency operation,” while domestic Islamic mayhem is filed under the category: “workplace violence.”

Fourteen years after 9/11 it is tragically clear that President Bush was right about the threat we faced and Democrats suicidally wrong. The 9/11 attacks were indeed a salvo in the war Islamists have declared on us but even now, fourteen years later, Democrats still want to regard such attacks as acts of individual criminality, and deal with them through the legal justice system, affording American rights to those who want to destroy American rights. Why, you may ask yourself, is the Boston Marathon bomber going to be tried in a criminal court of law, where he will be able to make propaganda for his cause underwritten by his victims? Because Democrats want it that way. It shows we’re superior to everybody else.

Nine days after 9/11 President Bush addressed both houses of Congress to outline his response to the terror attacks. This is what he said about states that harbor Islamic terrorists, like Yemen and Syria:

We will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.

When the president had completed his remarks, these were precisely the sentences that were singled out for attack by the political left. To progressives Bush was a tyrant in the making and they took his warning personally: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Unfortunately, even though Bush was not thinking of them in uttering these words, he might as well have been. When Bush decided to take on the terrorist-supporting, UN-defying regime of Saddam Hussein, Democrats went into full war mode against him, against the “war on terror” and against America’s mission to defeat the al-Qaeda armies that had assembled in Iraq. Their sabotage of the war went on for five years, making it impossible for Bush to take on the terror-supporting regimes in Syria, Iran and elsewhere.

The Obama regime is the product of this momentous Democratic defection from America’s purposes, from a robust defense of the American homeland, and from a militant response to the war that Islamists have declared on us. Why is there still a free flow of immigration from nations, like Yemen, that support or tolerate the Islamist armies ranged against us? Why isn’t our southern border secure? It is because the Obama regime, with support from Democrats in Congress, regards security measures against terror supporting states to be “Islamophobic,” and regards securing our southern border to be xenophobic. Why isn’t Obama embracing General Sisi and an Egyptian regime that has declared the Islamists to be enemies of the Islamic world? It is because Obama is committed to the Muslim Brotherhood – the fount of al-Qaeda – and against this same Egyptian regime.

Will the massacre in Paris — a repellent assault on free speech in the name of the “Prophet Mohammed” — wake up the Democrats and the Obama White House, and end their appeasement of Islamic terror? Unfortunately this is unlikely. Their leader is a lifetime, America-despising radical who has shown little appetite for changing course. It remains to be seen whether other Democrats will attribute their recent electoral drubbing to the weak-kneed security policies of the appeaser-in-chief, and find the voice to oppose him. But if they don’t, it is a safe bet that this country is in for some bloody consequences.

Islamic jihad gunmen have murdered twelve people in the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. One of the jihad murderers in Paris shouted, “We have avenged the prophet Muhammad,” making it abundantly clear that this was a jihad attack and a response to Charlie Hebdo’s daring to mock Muhammad.

It is virtually certain that the mainstream media response to this heinous mass murder will be calls for the West to restrict its freedom of expression, and not publish material that offends Muslims. If you think that is unlikely, remember that it has happened before. When the Obama Administration blamed the Benghazi jihad attack on a video about Muhammad, there were calls in the mainstream media for restrictions on the freedom of speech. Eric Posner in Slate derided the First Amendment’s “sacred status” and declared that “Americans need to learn that the rest of the world—and not just Muslims—see no sense in the First Amendment. Even other Western nations take a more circumspect position on freedom of expression than we do, realizing that often free speech must yield to other values and the need for order.”

In the Los Angeles Times, Sarah Chayes noted that “the current standard for restricting speech — or punishing it after it has in fact caused violence — was laid out in the 1969 case Brandenburg vs. Ohio. Under the narrower guidelines, only speech that has the intent and the likelihood of inciting imminent violence or lawbreaking can be limited.” She then argued at length that the Muhammad video did indeed have the likelihood of inciting imminent violence, and should thus be banned. Her article was a sleazy and dishonest sleight of hand, as the law is that speech that calls for violence can be banned, whereas she was arguing that speech that doesn’t call for violence, but that might make people who oppose it behave violently, should be banned. That would be to enshrine the heckler’s veto into law and to enable Islamic jihadis to silence anyone they disliked simply by killing someone.

And in the Washington Post, the gutter thug Nathan Lean (who has repeatedly published on Twitter what he thinks is my home address and places I frequent, in a transparent attempt to endanger me and those around me, and/or to frighten me into silence) declared: “The voices of hate that hope to fracture our society along religious lines should have no place in our public discourse.” Who would decide which are the “voices of hate” that should be silenced? People like Nathan Lean, of course – that is, purveyors of the “Islamophobia” myth who are determined to silence anyone and everyone who dares raise the slightest objection to the advancing jihad.

Now, as twelve people have been gunned down by Islamic jihadists in Paris, we will hear more such calls for restrictions on the freedom of speech. The likes of Posner, Chayes, and Lean will blame Charlie Hebdo and call on Western media to adopt Sharia blasphemy laws, and refrain from saying or doing anything that Muslims would find offensive — including, of course, honest discussion about how Islamic jihadists use Islamic texts and teachings to justify things like the Charlie Hebdo massacre.

This is the time to say, “Enough.” This is the time to say, We are going to stand for the freedom of speech. No more people are going to die for saying things that offend Muslims. The capacity to be offended and not respond with violence is essential to a pluralistic society, and the freedom of speech itself is our foremost protection against tyranny that would do whatever it willed and crush all dissent.

It is time to stand, or free speech will be lost, and when it is lost, all will be lost.

The structure of history is held together by two essential and distinct kinds of links, two moments in time to which no one is immune: moments of epiphany, and moments of catastrophe. Sometimes, both elements intermingle at the birth of a singular epoch. Men often awaken to understanding in the midst of great crisis; and, invariably, great crises can erupt when men awaken. These are the moments when social gravity vanishes, when the kinetic glue of normalcy melts away, and we begin to see the true foundations of our world, if a foundation exists at all.

Catastrophe occurs when too many people refuse to accept that around us always are two universes at work. There is the cold, hard reality that underlies everything. And on the surface is a veil of deceit and compromise. The more humanity compromises vital truths in order to enjoy the comfort of illusions, the more mind-shattering it will be when those illusions fall away. These two worlds can coexist only for short periods of time, and they will always and eventually collide. There is no other possible outcome.

I think it could be said that the more polarized our realities become, the more explosive and disastrous the reaction will be when the separation is removed. I feel it absolutely necessary to relate this danger because today humanity is living so historically far from the bedrock of reality, political reality, social reality and economic reality that the stage has been set for a kind of full spectrum destabilization that has never been seen before.

Though my analysis tends to lean toward the economic side of things, I am not only speaking of shattered illusions in the financial realm. In my next article, one last time I plan to go over nearly every mainstream economic statistic used today to misdirect the public (from national debt to unemployment to inflation to retail sales and corporate profits) and expose why they are false while giving you the real numbers. Most of my regular readers are familiar with much of this information, but I think it important to consolidate it all in a single article so that we can take stock of where our society sits fiscally as we enter 2015. For now, though, I want to discuss the core problem of self-deception, the problem that makes all the rest of our problems possible.

When the initial phase of the global collapse was triggered in 2007 and 2008, there was a substantial explosion in interest and education in terms of liberty issues and alternative economic awareness. I remember back in 2006 when I had just begun writing for the movement that the ratio of people on any given Web forum or in any given public discussion was vastly opposed to alternative viewpoints and information — at least 50-1 by my observations. We were at the height of the real estate frenzy; everyone was buying houses with money they didn’t have and borrowing on their mortgages to purchase stuff they didn’t need. Life was good. The shock of the credit crisis came quickly and abruptly for most people, and there has been a considerable shift in the kinds of discussions many are willing to entertain about our future. Yet the idea that such things can happen despite a consensus of social and geopolitical health does not seemed to have soaked into the thick skulls of average people.

Time, unfortunately, has a magical ability to erase vigilance. It’s not that the public has necessarily forgotten that danger can strike anytime anywhere (though some of them have). Many of them know full well that our culture is floating on a paper-thin ship in a turbulent sea. However, the disturbing trend today reveals that people have decided they do not care. “Taking the blue pill” is the rising rally cry from the so-called “new normal.” Yes, the economy is an illusion, the political system is an illusion and the various global conflicts our society participates in are mostly illusions. But we “can’t do anything about it,” so we might as well profit from these illusions while we can, right?

It has been said that during the economic collapse of the 1930s that the Great Depression was a depression only for the 30 percent of people that had lost everything. For the employed and the financially secure, the depression was much like any other time. This is the point at which we stand today in the collective mindset. With nearly a third of the U.S. population kicked off the unemployment rolls and approximately half the country dependent on a government check of some kind for their survival, the current depression is only now beginning to feel like a depression for anyone. The soup lines have received a fresh candy coating of EBT cards and welfare payments, but the illusion is finally fading, and this should be of great concern to us all in 2015.

Even more frightening is our culture’s deluded sense of what a collapse actually looks like. For many, collapse is a cinematic and overnight affair, with zombies, nuclear bombs and mass panic. In real life, and throughout history, collapse is a process. Since at least 2008, the U.S. and the rest of the world have been experiencing that process. Everyone is waiting for equities to implode and for social unrest to erupt before they take the threat seriously, but these are not signals of collapse. These are the things that occur when a collapse has run its course. Collapse never occurs overnight. It takes years for the effects of social and fiscal breakdown to be visibly felt. And when they are felt, many people refuse to notice. Eighty years ago, America was halfway through the Great Depression, and mainstream economists were STILL claiming that recovery was right around the corner. Illusion and self-deception can be so powerful that the worst miseries can be normalized, at least for a little while.

And it isn’t only the general public that is stricken with crippling bias. There are those within the liberty movement who have bought into false paradigms for various reasons, and this threatens any progress we have made over the past several years. There are those who still think that the “conflict” between Eastern and Western politicians and banking elites is somehow real. There are those who believe that Russia and China, despite their numerous and undeniable ties to the global banking syndicate (information I have covered in multiple articles over the years), are the "good guys", while Western nations are the "bad guys", rather than them all being mere subsidiaries and franchises of the same monstrous globalist machine.

They hold onto this illusion, I think, because it is much more frightening to accept the reality that we are alone, that the liberty movement is the first and last line of defense against centralization, that the responsibility for the future of independence and individual freedom rests on our shoulders. It is much easier to fantasize that there are others out there, nations and governments with armies and capital, that are on our side and will fight our battles for us. This illusion will be a painful one for many in the movement as they begin to realize that the East is actually working in tandem with international financiers instead of working against them.

There are also those in the liberty movement who cling to the notion that the fight against globalism will be won without physical conflict. They believe that if we simply protest long enough, play the political and legal game long enough, nullify long enough, refuse to participate long enough, that the elitist edifice, an edifice which has existed for centuries and has manipulated historical precedence for just as long, will suddenly disappear in a puff of fairy dust.

The first problem with this strategy is that it relies on the assumption of time. Sure, anything is possible given ample opportunity. Perhaps the movement could grind away at the New World Order over the course of several decades until the majority of the masses are awake and aware (which is exactly how long it would take). However, I think it infinitely foolish to presume that we have decades to accomplish such a task. If the past has shown us anything, it is that tyranny does not respect reason and, at a certain point, couldn’t care less about image. Tyranny respects only power. It does not respect the protestations of ants it can crush under foot, but it will make a wide path around a rattlesnake ready to strike. While there is utility in the pursuit of intellectual and philosophical combat, if you are not willing to be the rattlesnake as well, then you are not going to affect change against such an opponent. You will eventually be stepped on.

The refusal to accept responsibility for one’s own defense is yet another product of fear — fear that the enemy is too powerful, that all resistance is futile. But resistance is only assured failure if resistance is never undertaken. Sheeple defeat themselves within their own minds before they ever stand up, and so they never stand. This is the only reason totalitarian elements ever achieve success. Again, many in the liberty movement are going to face a rude awakening when they realize they have relied too much on the notion of the system policing itself, instead of preparing for the worst-case scenario.

And finally, the globalists themselves suffer from a veritable fog of illusions to which I can speak only briefly.

We are stepping over the threshold of an age that will shatter the illusions of everyone, and the internationalists are no exception. The root pillar of elitist globalism itself is that some men are born to rule, while other men are born to serve. Some men are born kings, and other men are born slaves. The psychopathy of this belief system should be evident, but psychopathy also elicits blinding ego and hubris, which smothers any inherent questions of motive. I do not think the elites ever actually consider the validity of their own philosophies. I am relatively certain their manner of viewing the world is much like that of a cult, a religious sect driven by the brutality of zealotry rather than the empowering nature of understanding.

Such men cannot be reasoned with. In fact, zealots often revel in their ability to trample all other world views as they grasp for complete dominance of their ideology. The illusion of rightness is far more important to them than actual truth, and this is their greatest weakness. Hidden under all the posturing and power grabbing, deep in the recesses of their own assumed omnipotence, I sense an ever present terror within the globalist culture. I sense a brand of terror that comes only from the seed of doubt.

The incredible array of propaganda leveled at the public, the constant war gaming and mind gaming against the citizenry, the endless hailstorm of legal maneuvering designed to erase our sense of connection with our natural rights and liberties, the tidal wave of fearmongering, and all the manipulations and scapegoats and elaborate theatrical displays, all reek of fear. For if the globalists were truly as omnipotent as they pretend to be — if they really were all-knowing philosopher kings born to rule — then they would already have their New World Order. They would not need lies. They would not need the threat of force. The undeniable power of their ideology would be enough if their ideology actually had any validity. Lies are designed to hide lack of validity and lack of strength. The globalists are, at bottom, a hollow shell desperately clamoring for substance.

What may appear to be the "thoroughness" of the elitist con is actually a form of micro-management that exhibits a fundamental doubt of success. The globalists wish they could predict the future, but they cannot. So they are just as afraid as most of humanity. I believe we are entering an era in which they will feel the stark pain of shattered illusions and the destruction of their own fantasies, no less felt than the pain of the rest of the world.

Our mission as an opposing force to globalism is to come to terms with our own illusions and to erase them, to stop compromising and to stop waiting for the final shoe to drop and to take positive action now rather than after the endgame develops. This means preparation and organization for the worst-case scenarios. This means making one’s family, neighborhood and community as self-reliant and secure as possible. The excuses have to stop. The distractions and intellectualized silver bullet solutions have to stop. Hard work and risk are all that are left, all that matters. If we do this, and if we do this now, then victory is possible. In any contest of strength and will, he who knows himself best, he who sheds all illusion, will be the winner.

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Speaker of the House John Boehner is apparently punishing Republicans who voted against his re-election Tuesday, despite previously saying he would not do so.

Reps. Daniel Webster and Richard Nugent are both losing their seats on the House Rules Committee, Politico reported Tuesday evening. Both Florida Republicans voted for Webster instead of Boehner earlier in the day.

Such moves seem to contradict recent statements made by Boehner and his office.

Asked last week if any Republicans who voted against Boehner would be punished, spokesman Michael Steel told The Daily Caller by email: “Boehner has said publicly that there will be no retribution for ‘no’ votes.”

In September, USA Today reported that Boehner “shot down fresh rumors that he will face a revolt from conservatives when he seeks a third term as speaker in January, and he dismissed suggestions that his leadership team would strip committee assignments from any GOP lawmaker who voted against him.”

Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert, who voted for himself for speaker on Tuesday, called Boehner a “sore winner,” citing the reported punishment.

“After being told that we should now all come together and work together, we have been told late today that two of our Congressmen are being taken off of the committee they were on, simply for voting like their voters wanted,” Gohmert said in a Tuesday statement. “So, it appears before we can work together, we are now going to have another fight. It would be a shame if the Speaker of the House who has so much power is a sore winner.”

This isn’t the first time Boehner has been accused of taking away committee assignments from disloyal Republicans. In 2012, Michigan Rep. Justin Amash and Kansas Rep. Tim Huelskamp lost seats on the House Budget Committee. Arizona Rep. David Schweikert and North Carolina Rep. Walter Jones were also booted from the Financial Services Committee.

Webster — who is being kicked off the speaker’s powerful Rules Committee — won a surprising 12 votes to replace Boehner on Tuesday.

The ideological differences between the establishment GOP and the party’s conservative wing became more evident yesterday during the latest election for Speaker of the House. Hours before the vote, a “dump Boehner” movement aimed at denying the Ohio Republican a third term appeared to be gaining momentum. “A fresh start often requires change, and I believe that change should start with the election of a new Speaker,” wrote Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-SC) on his Facebook page.

Change didn’t happen. Boehner was reelected by a margin of 216 votes out of 408 votes cast.

The revolt against the status quo yielded at least three representatives willing to challenge Boehner for the job. Taking up the effort were two Florida Republicans, Rep. Ted Yoho and Rep. Daniel Webster, and conservative stalwart Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas. Gohmert frequently appears at events hosted by the David Horowitz Freedom Center and was a featured speaker at the Freedom Center’s Restoration Weekend in 2014.

And while the odds of them winning were low, their efforts were not in vain, as the number of Republicans willing to challenge Boehner got larger. Early Tuesday it was reported that 10 Republicans were against Boehner’s reappointment, but by the time Yoho spoke with Fox News the number had grown to 13. By afternoon two more defectors had joined the ranks, including Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-KS), who had originally indicated he would vote for Boehner. Another defector was Texas Rep. Randy Weber. He voted for Boehner in 2013, but indicated that Gohmert was now his first choice. “Let’s all get behind Judge Louie Gohmert for Speaker!” Weber wrote on Twitter. “He has my vote! He’s not afraid to take the fight to the president & his veto pen!”

Rep. Dave Brat (R-VA), who shocked the GOP Establishment when he defeated former Majority Leader Eric Cantor in that state’s primary, expressed the sentiment of his rebellious colleagues, contending Republican leadership has “strayed from its own principles of free market, limited government, (and) constitutional conservatism.”

Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-OK), who was also a featured speaker at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s Restoration Weekend in 2014, illuminated one of the primary examples of GOP straying. He released a statement explaining that Boehner and President Obama

crafted the CR/Omnibus, a $1.1 trillion spending bill which funded the government for 10 months and blocked our newest elected Republicans from advancing conservative policy and delivering on campaign promises. With this vote, Republicans gave away the best tool available to rein in our liberal activist President: the power of the purse.

A majority of rank-and-file Republicans also expressed disdain for Boehner’s leadership. A national telephone survey conducted Dec. 26-30 revealed that 60 percent of voters who voted for Republicans in 2014 either “definitely” or “probably” wanted their congressional representative to vote for someone other than Boehner. Those who definitely wanted Boehner deposed comprised 34 percent of the vote, while 26 percent probably wanted someone else. On the other side of the equation, only 11 percent definitely wanted to keep Boehner, and 15 percent probably wanted him to remain.

The Speaker didn’t fare much better with regard to specific questions. By a margin of 52-37 percent, the respondents indicated they didn’t trust Boehner to fight for the issues most important to Republicans. He got hammered even harder when asked about his effectiveness in opposing Obama’s agenda with a whopping 64 percent agreeing that he was not effective, compared to only 24 percent who thought he was. Boehner couldn’t even get a majority of Republicans to agree strongly or somewhat that he “has the best interests of the American public at heart, rather than special interests,” with only 44 percent saying he would watch out for the public, barely edging the 43 percent who thought he would cater to the well-connected.

Boehner needed a simple majority to get reelected, but for much of the day it was impossible to determine what the actual number would be due to outside factors. They included Rep. Michael Grimm’s (R-NY) resignation following a guilty plea for tax evasion, a dozen Democrats attending former New York Governor Mario Cuomo’s funeral in Manhattan, and several lawmakers unable to reach Washington, D.C. due to bad weather. At the very least the rebels were hoping to force a second round of voting for the first time since 1923, when Frederick H. Gillett (R-MA) needed nine ballots to win reelection as speaker, according to the Congressional Research Service. Gillett ultimately prevailed.

In the end, so did Boehner. Shortly before 3p.m. EST he secured his reelection, topping Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) who got 164 votes. And while conservatives fell well short of securing enough votes to force a second round, the number of dissenting Republicans had grown to 25, the largest number of naysayers since the aforementioned 1923 vote.

“This is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad,” Boehner said, taking the gavel from Pelosi. Before handing it over, Pelosi made one more push for the Democratic agenda, promising to introduce legislation that would raise taxes on wealthy Americans and businesses, boost spending on infrastructure, and focus on voting rights. “We invite our Republican colleagues to join us,” she said to the scattered applause that is perhaps the best indicator of her chances for success.

By contrast, Boehner promised to make the economy his party’s top priority. Toward that end he will reintroduce measures that passed in the House with bipartisan support during the previous Congress, but ultimately died in the then-Democratically-controlled Senate, when former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) amply fulfilled his role as obstructionist-in-chief.

And while Republican rebels made their voices heard, there was no real opposition to Boehner’s reelection in terms of alternative choices. Webster earned 12 votes, falling well short of threatening Boehner despite being the largest single challenge in years, and Gohmert received three votes of support. Several other GOPers received votes as well.

In a statement, Rep. Lou Barletta (R-PA) expressed one of the establishment GOP viewpoints for supporting Boehner, explaining that he was willing to give the thrice-elected Speaker a chance to “negotiate with a Senate which, for once, is not an automatic adversary.” Rep. John Fleming (R-LA) offered a different take. “He led us through a period where we’ve increased our majority, substantially,” he said.

Despite Boehner’s victory, Rep. Pat Tiberi (R-OH) was frustrated. “The American people are going to give us two years to try to get things done, and we have to be serious about it. We have to be focused on it, and things like this are a distraction,” he contended. “The debate about this is important, but we had this in November. To have a handful of folks gin this up with talk radio is really, really unfortunate.”

When a survey showing 60 percent of the electorate who voted Republican want someone other than Boehner running the House, the notion that a “handful of folks” are “ginning” up animosity rings exceedingly hollow. Moreover the real “gin-meister” might be Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who dismissed conservative concerns as “scary” right around the time the survey was conducted. “I don’t want the American people to think that if they add a Republican president to a Republican Congress, that’s going to be a scary outcome,” he said during an interview with the Washington Post just before Christmas. “I want the American people to be comfortable with the fact that the Republican House and Senate is a responsible, right-of-center, governing majority.”

McConnell pushed the envelope even further. “There would be nothing frightening about adding a Republican president to that governing majority,” he added. “I think that’s the single best thing we can do, is to not mess up the playing field, if you will, for whoever the nominee ultimately is.”

Not messing up the playing field is the essence of establishment GOP thinking. And it is that thinking that more than likely led to Obama being reelected, despite getting 7.6 million fewer votes in 2012 than 2008, when Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan managed to garner 1.3 million fewer votes than John McCain and Sarah Palin. That would be the same John McCain and Sarah Palin facing a “hope and change” Obama in all his euphoric glory, not the Obama saddled with a dismal economy, skyrocketing debt, and numerous scandals. Romney lost nonetheless, in large part because the GOP base stayed home, not willing to invest the time and energy to vote for yet another “unfrightening” candidate.

Furthermore, it was Obama himself who framed the 2014 election as a referendum on his agenda, and the electorate “rewarded” the president and his party with the loss of 9 Senate seats and the largest Republican majority in the House since WWll. That voters wanted to bottle up that agenda is inarguable. So is the idea that millions of Americans yearn for genuine leadership.

Unfortunately, the reelection of John Boehner indicates establishment Republicans are content with the status quo, and Americans will undoubtedly hear a familiar GOP refrain about being only “one more election (of a GOP president) away” from making real changes. As for the GOP base, many of whom jammed the phones urging their representative not to vote for Boehner, and who believe as Bill Gheen, founder of Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, put it, that his reelection is “a vote for amnesty,” will yet again be seen as people with no other place to go in 2016.

The GOP has two years to convince that base, along with other Americans, they are worthy of the electorate’s ongoing support. The reelection of John Boehner as Speaker of the House is not an encouraging first step.

As the dramatic House vote for Speaker draws near, there is one salient observation overlooked by the Washington political class. Nobody – not one member is willing to publicly defend or vouch for Boehner as a bold and effective leader of the Republican opposition or as a spokesman for the party’s conservative platform.

It’s no enigma why we are not seeing a cheerleading squad for Boehner; his actions are indefensible. If he privately told Obama to go ahead with executive amnesty, what else has he told him?

It’s no enigma why we are not seeing a cheerleading squad for Boehner; his actions are indefensible. If he privately told Obama to go ahead with executive amnesty, what else has he told him?

But still, isn’t there anyone who is willing to go to bat for him?

While watching the drama unfold on Monday, we witnessed debates over tactics, questions about “alternative” candidates, and predictions whether the coup would succeed or whether it was a good idea. But one thing we didn’t see was anyone defending John Boehner. Even his supporters refuse to defend him.

Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-VA), a down-the-line establishment foot soldier, was the first member to publicly and formally put out a statement announcing his intention to vote for Boehner. His rationale? There is no alternative. Let’s put aside the fact that this is a straw man argument. We have a loyal Boehner member who can’t muster anything positive to say about the Speaker, and in fact, he explicitly says that we need stronger leadership.

What about Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH), a member who represents a district next door to John Boehner in Ohio? He launches into a long dissertation on the importance of showing unity and being in support of something!

Wow – these are ringing endorsements of John Boehner. As if to say, “Hey, look, we have to be for something and show unity, and we don’t really have an alternative, but if we did I’d be on board the effort to fire Boehner.”

Even Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK), one of Boehner’s fiercest lieutenants, couldn’t conjure up anything positive about Boehner other than assailing conservatives as “unprofessional.” I guess the unprecedented number of constituents melting down the congressional switchboard were also unprofessional?

Consider this for a moment: none of the major conservative organizations even put out massive email blasts and campaigns encouraging people to call their members. This is solely the voice of the people. Moreover, this was a sleepy Monday, coming off the longest Holiday season of the year. Yet, members were receiving hundreds of calls demanding they oppose the sitting party leader. These were Republican voters. One member said he couldn’t even get ahold of his own office because the lines were jammed.

Ironically, the stenographers for the establishment in the Republican-leaning media relentlessly mocked a poll showing that 60% of GOP voters want a new Speaker. It will be interesting to see if these people can recognize reality when it slaps them in the face.

But there is one other important nugget in that poll, as observed by pollster Pat Caddell:

“The alienation among Republican voters is so high,” says Caddell, that conservatively “a quarter to one-third of the Republican party are hanging by a thread from bolting.” Caddell argues that GOP voters’ attitudes are “so anti-establishment,” and they give Republican leadership poor ratings. [Breitbart]Boehner might win the vote tomorrow. But he has forever lost the people of his own party.

Boehner might win the vote tomorrow. But he has forever lost the people of his own party. His policies and actions as Speaker are indefensible, as clearly demonstrated by the lack of public defenders of his record. You can only go so long being perpetually at war with the base of a party before the thousand cuts become mortal wounds.

The elites in the GOP establishment and the gutless conservatives who are enabling them should be careful what they wish for.

Daniel Horowitz is Senior Editor of Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @RMConservative.

Lawmakers opposed to President Obama’s sudden move to cozy up to Communist Cuba are vowing a full-court press to prevent official diplomatic recognition of the tropical prison republic from going forward.

But it is far from clear if lawmakers will be able to do much about Obama’s Cuban escapades. Presidents typically enjoy great latitude in foreign policy, especially concerning recognition of foreign governments. Lawmakers are probably on stronger ground in resisting repeal of the trade embargo that has been in place since the 1960s. On the other hand, Obama has a pen and a phone, as he likes to say, a reference to his brazen contempt for the rule of law and the strictures of the Constitution.

Obama’s dramatic actions are setting off a feeding frenzy as American companies salivate at the prospect of doing business in Cuba. Little do they realize that Cuba, a dilapidated Stalinist state that, thanks to the absence of good paying jobs, serves largely as a seedy sex tourism destination for Europeans and hardly has an economy at all. Some business restrictions were already eased by the U.S. around 2000. Some companies are allowed to sell medical equipment to the Cuban government. There is not much money to be made, at least not initially.

Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), who are both of Cuban ancestry, have made strong statements about their intentions.

Rubio said it mattered not a whit to him if “99 percent of people in polls” disagreed with his position. “Appeasing the Castro brothers will only cause other tyrants from Caracas to Tehran to Pyongyang to see that they can take advantage of President Obama’s naivete during his final two years in office.”

Rubio said he reserved the right “to do everything within the rules of the Senate to prevent that sort of individual from ever even coming up for a vote,” a reference to confirmation proceedings for a prospective U.S. ambassador to Cuba.

Menendez said he was “deeply disappointed” and that it was “a fallacy to believe that Cuba will reform because an American president opens his hands and the Castro brothers will suddenly unclench their fists.”

The chill in relations between the two countries has its roots in the Cold War.

Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, whose forces overthrew the comparatively mild authoritarian regime of Fulgencio Batista, tried to start a nuclear war with the United States and in 1963 openly called for the assassination of President John Kennedy and his brother Robert, the U.S. attorney general. War was only narrowly averted after the Soviet Union turned around ships that were carrying nuclear weapons to Cuba. A short time later one of Castro’s followers, a man named Lee Harvey Oswald, murdered President Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. Cuba is a longtime state sponsor of terrorism and has meddled militarily and otherwise in the affairs of its neighbors and in faraway countries such as Angola. President Reagan ordered an invasion of Grenada after its Marxist dictatorship grew too close to Cuba and he struggled heroically to aid the anticommunist contras in their war against the Cuban-backed Communist regime in Nicaragua.

Many conservatives in Congress and elsewhere are saying Obama is a weak leader.

For example, former Ambassador to the UN John Bolton said on the Fox News Channel on Wednesday that Obama’s moves on Cuba constitute “appeasement” and are a “very, very bad signal of weakness and lack of resolve by the president of the United States.”

Bolton and others are correct in terms of how the U.S. is perceived abroad under Obama but this does not reflect weak leadership on Obama’s part. This president knows what he is doing and when given the opportunity to do the right thing reliably chooses to do the wrong thing. Obama is taking the country’s foreign policy in exactly the right direction in terms of his sinister ideology. Obama does not mean well. He does not, unlike traditional U.S. presidents, think of himself as the leader of the free world. He wants to fundamentally transform America inside and out and is quite content to enfeeble the nation by crippling its military, betraying its allies, and embracing its enemies.

All of this excitement follows the sudden release Wednesday of Alan Gross, a U.S. development worker held in a Cuban prison. (An intelligence operative loyal to the U.S. was also released as part of the deal. Details about that individual are scarce.) Gross is a garden-variety leftist who is being used by President Obama to justify establishing diplomatic and trade relations with Cuba.

Obama is repaying a debt to his Marxist friends and allies. Just as President Bill Clinton rewarded his neo-communist supporters by pardoning Marxist Puerto Rican terrorists, Obama is rewarding his Castro-admiring base by freeing Communist spies working for a hostile foreign power.

Gross was reportedly a subcontractor for the U.S. Agency for International Development, which is frequently a home for meddling left-wing activists. He reportedly worked on a program aimed at improving Internet access for Cuban Jews. Why the Obama administration would knowingly send an American into Cuba to perform services they had to have known were considered illegal by Cuban authorities is not clear. The free flow of information is a threat to any totalitarian regime, so a Cuban court convicted Gross of crimes against the state in 2011, sentencing him to a 15-year prison term.

Under a deal that Pope Francis, among others, helped to facilitate, Gross was exchanged for the remaining three members of the so-called Cuban Five — Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, and Ramón Labañino — who had been held in U.S. prisons. All five Cuban nationals were convicted of spying in 2001. They gathered information on Cuban exiles in the U.S. in order to lay the ground for violent action against them in the future. Hernández was also convicted of conspiring to commit murder.

As Gross prepared for his press conference Wednesday, there was a portrait of Communist mass murderer Che Guevara clearly visible in the Washington, D.C. office of Gross’s lawyer, high-profile attorney Scott D. Gilbert of Gilbert LLP. The bloodthirsty Guevara was minister of industry and president of the Cuban National Bank. He also administered kangaroo courts that condemned enemies of Fidel Castro’s regime to death. In other words, as Gross prepared his statement about being freed from a Cuban jail, an iconic photograph honoring Cuba’s most infamous jailer stared down at him.

Guevara, incidentally, wanted to annihilate the United States.

“If the nuclear missiles [from the missile crisis] had remained [in Cuba] we would have fired them against the heart of the U.S. including New York City,” he said. “The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims.”

In the press conference Gross maligned the U.S., pulling a cowardly pox-on-both-your-houses stunt. Gross drew a moral equivalency between the U.S. and the ruthless authoritarian regime he just escaped:

I also feel compelled to share with you my utmost respect for and fondness of the people of Cuba. In no way are they responsible for the ordeal to which my family and I have been subjected. To me cubanos, or at least most of them, are incredibly kind, generous and talented. It pains me to see them treated so unjustly as a consequence of two governments’ mutually belligerent policies. Five and a half decades of history show us such belligerence inhibits better judgment. Two wrongs never make a right. I truly hope that we can now get beyond these mutually belligerent policies and I was very happy to hear what the president had to say today. It was particularly cool to be sitting next to the secretary of state as he was hearing about his job description for the next couple of months. In all seriousness, this is a game-changer, which I fully support. [Emphasis added.]

Who condemns his own countrymen as imperialist warmongers after they cut a deal to get him repatriated from the clutches of a dictatorship? And why would he use his opportunity in the spotlight to praise President Obama’s decision to normalize relations with the regime that he believes unjustly imprisoned him?

The whole thing doesn’t smell right. Clearly it was in the works for a long time.

Those who follow President Obama’s policy initiatives already know that he delights in trading Americans who hate America for foreign terrorists and murderers who also hate America. Not so long ago there was the swap of U.S Army deserter and Taliban collaborator Bowe Bergdahl for five members of the Taliban’s high command. Not exactly a good deal for America.

What’s next for Obama, who is hellbent to knock America down a few pegs?

Diplomatic recognition for Iran? At first glance such a development might seem unlikely, but Obama does harbor deep affection for hardline Islamic states. He aided Mohamed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and during anti-government unrest that began in Iran in 2009, Obama effectively propped up the Islamist regime there by doing nothing to oppose it.

Anything could happen with Obama in his final two years in the White House.

Note: The following article was published on PJ Media where it is supplemented with clips from various mafia-related movies like The Godfather to help demonstrate the ten similarities. Portions of this article were earlier serialized on FrontPage Magazine.

During a debate on HBO’s Real Time last October, host Bill Maher declared that Islam is “the only religion that acts like the mafia, that will f***ing kill you if you say the wrong thing, draw the wrong picture, or write the wrong book.”

Maher was apparently referring to Islam’s “blasphemy” laws, which ban on pain of death any “insult”—as found in a statement, a picture, a book—to Islam and especially its prophet, Muhammad.

While Maher has been criticized for his “Islamophobic” assertion, he and others may be surprised to learn that the similarities between Islam and the mafia far exceed punishing those who say, draw, or write “the wrong thing.”

In what follows, we will examine a number of these similarities.

We will begin by looking at the relationship between Allah, his messenger Muhammad, and the Muslims, and note several parallels with the relationship between the godfather, his underboss, and the mafia.

Next, we will examine the clannish nature of the mafia and compare it to Islam’s tribalism, especially in the context of the Islamic doctrine “Loyalty and Enmity.” For example, in both Islam and the mafia, members who wish to break away, to “apostatize,” are killed.

We will consider how the mafia and Islam have both historically profited from the “protection” racket: Islam has demanded jizya from non-Muslims under its authority/territory and the mafia has demanded pizzo from people that fall under its jurisdiction.

Finally, we will consider what accounts for these many similarities between Islam and the mafia, including from an historical perspective.

1. Allah and Muhammad/Godfather and Underboss

The padrino of larger mafia organizations and families—literally, the “godfather” or “boss of bosses”—has absolute control over his subordinates and is often greatly feared by them for his ruthlessness. He has an “underboss,” a right-hand man who issues his orders and enforces his will. The godfather himself is often inaccessible; mafia members need to go through the underboss or other high ranking associates.

Compare this with the relationship between Allah and his “messenger” Muhammad (in Arabic, Muhammad is most commonly referred to as al-rasul, “the messenger”). Unlike the Judeo-Christian God—a personal God, a Father, that according to Christ is to be communed with directly (Matt 6:9)—Islam’s god, Allah, is unreachable, unknowable, untouchable. Like the godfather, he is inaccessible. His orders are revealed by his messenger, Muhammad.

If the Judeo-Christian God calls on the faithful to “come now, let us reason together” (Isaiah 1:18), Allah says “Do not ask questions about things that, if made known to you, would only pain you” (Koran 5:101). Just follow orders.

2. A “Piece of the Action”

The godfather and his underboss always get a “piece of the action”—a “cut”—of all spoils acquired by their subordinates.

So do Allah and his messenger, Muhammad. Koran 8:41 informs Muslims that “one-fifth of all war-booty you acquire goes to Allah and the messenger” (followed by Muhammad’s family and finally the needy).

3. Assassinations

The godfather, through his underboss, regularly sends mafia men to make “hits”—to assassinate—those deemed enemies of the family.

So did Allah and his messenger. One example: A non-Muslim poet, Ka‘b ibn Ashraf, insulted Muhammad, prompting the latter to exclaim, “Who will kill this man who has hurt Allah and his messenger?” A young Muslim named Ibn Maslama volunteered on condition that to get close enough to assassinate Ka‘b he be allowed to lie to the poet.

Allah’s messenger agreed. Ibn Maslama traveled to Ka‘b and began to denigrate Islam and Muhammad until his disaffection became so convincing that the poet took him into his confidence. Soon thereafter, Ibn Maslama appeared with another Muslim and, while Ka‘b’s guard was down, slaughtered the poet, bringing his head to Muhammad to the usual triumphant cries of “Allahu Akbar!”

4. Circumstance is Everything

While the mafia adheres to a general code of conduct, the godfather issues more fluid orders according to circumstances.

This is reminiscent of the entire “revelation” of the Koran, where later verses/commands contradict earlier verses/commands, depending on circumstances (known in Islamic jurisprudence as al-nāsikh wal-mansūkh, or the doctrine of abrogation).

While other religions and scriptures may have contradictions, only Islam rationalizes them through abrogation—that is, by giving prominence to later verses which are seen as the “latest” decision of the deity.

5. Clan Loyalty

Loyalty is fundamental in the mafia. Following elaborate rituals of blood oaths, mafia members are expected to maintain absolute loyalty to the family, on pain of death.

Similarly, mafia members are expected always to be available for the family—“even if your wife is about to give birth,” as one of the mafia’s “ten commandments” puts it—and to defend the godfather and his honor, even if it costs their lives.

Compare this to the widespread violence and upheavals that occur whenever Allah or his prophet is offended—whenever non-Muslim “infidels” blaspheme them. Or, as Bill Maher put it: “Its’ the only religion that acts like the mafia, that will f***ing kill you if you say the wrong thing, draw the wrong picture, or write the wrong book.”

Islam’s “Loyalty and Enmity” doctrine (al-wala’ wa’l bara’)—which calls on Muslims to be loyal to one another even if they dislike each other—is especially illustrative. Koran 9:71 declares that “The believing [Muslim] men and believing [Muslim] women are allies of one another” (see also 8:72-75). And according to Muhammad, “A Muslim is the brother of a Muslim. He neither oppresses him nor humiliates him nor looks down upon him…. All things of a Muslim are inviolable for his brother in faith: his blood, his wealth, and his honor”—precisely those three things that mafia members respect among each other. This is why Muslims like U.S. Army Major Nidal Hassan, whose “worst nightmare” was to be deployed to fight fellow Muslims, often lash out.)

6. Death to Traitors

Once a fledging mafia member takes the oath of loyalty to the mafia—including the Omertà code of silence and secrecy—trying to leave the “family” is seen as a betrayal and punishable by death. Any family member, great or small, is given authority to kill the traitor, the “turncoat.”

Compare this to Islam. To be born to a Muslim father immediately makes the newborn a Muslim—there are no oaths to be taken, much less any choice in the matter. And, according to Islamic law, if born Muslims at any point in their lives choose to leave Islam, they are deemed “apostates”—traitors—and punished including by death. Any zealous Muslim, not just the authorities, is justified in killing the apostate (hence why Muslim families that kill apostate children are rarely if ever prosecuted).

Aside from loyalty to the family, mafia members are also expected not to befriend or freely associate with “outsiders”—who by nature are not to be trusted, as they are not of the “family”—unless such a “friendship” helps advance the family’s position.

Similarly, the second half of the doctrine of Loyalty and Enmity—the enmity (al-bara’)—calls on Muslims to maintain distance from and bear enmity for all non-Muslims, or “infidels.”

Thus Koran 5:51 warns Muslims against “taking the Jews and Christians as friends and allies … whoever among you takes them for friends and allies, he is surely one of them.” According to the mainstream Islamic exegesis of al-Tabari, Koran 5:51 means that the Muslim who “allies with them [non-Muslims] and enables them against the believers, that same one is a member of their faith and community,” that is, a defector, an apostate, an enemy.

Similar scriptures include Koran 4:89, 5:54, 6:40, 9:23, and 58:22; the latter simply states that true Muslims do not befriend non-Muslims—“even if they be their fathers, sons, brothers, or kin.” Koran 60:1 declares, “O you who believe! Do not take my enemy and your enemy [non-believers] for friends: would you offer them love while they deny what has come to you of the truth [i.e., while they deny Islam]?” And Koran 4:144 declares “O you who believe! Do not take the infidels as allies instead of the believers. Do you wish to give Allah [“godfather”] a clear case against yourselves?”

8. Deception and Dissimulation

As mentioned, close relations to non-mafia individuals that prove advantageous to the family (for example, collaboration with a “crooked cop”) are permissible—as long as the mafia keeps a safe distance, keeps the outsider at arm’s length.

Compare this to Koran 3:28 which commands “believers not to take infidels for friends and allies instead of believers… unless you but guard yourselves against them, taking precautions.” According to the standard Koran commentary of Tabari, “taking precautions” means:

If you [Muslims] are under their [non-Muslims’] authority, fearing for yourselves, behave loyally to them with your tongue while harboring inner animosity for them … [but know that] Allah has forbidden believers from being friendly or on intimate terms with the infidels rather than other believers—except when infidels are above them [in authority]. Should that be the case, let them act friendly towards them while preserving their religion.

Similarly, a few years ago, Sheikh Muhammad Hassan—a leading Salafi cleric in Egypt—asserted on live television that, while Muslims should never smile to the faces of non-Muslims, they should smile, however insincerely, if so doing helps empower Islam, especially in the context of da‘wa.

The idea of hating “outsiders” is apparently so ingrained in Islam that another leading Salafi cleric, Dr. Yasser al-Burhami, insists that, while Muslim men may marry Christian and Jewish women, they must hate them in their heart—and show them that they hate them in the hopes that they convert to the “family” of Islam.

(For more on the doctrine of “Loyalty and Enmity,” including references to the exegetical sources quoted above, see al-Qaeda leader Dr. Ayman Zawahiri’s comprehensive treatise by that name in The Al Qaeda Reader, pgs. 63-115.)

9. “An Offer You Can’t Refuse”

Although the novel-turned-movie, The Godfather, is fictitious, it also captures much of the mafia’s modus operandi. Consider, for example, that most famous of lines—“I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse”—spoken by the Godfather to one of his “godsons,” an aspiring actor and singer. After being turned down by a studio director for a role that he desperately wanted, the godson turned to his Godfather for aid.

As the movie progresses, it becomes clear that the offer that can’t be refused consists of nothing less than violence and death threats: after the Godfather’s messenger to the director asking that the actor be given the role is again rejected, the director awakens the next morning to find the bloodied and decapitated head of his favorite stallion in bed with him. The godson subsequently gets the movie role.

Throughout the context of the entire Godfather trilogy (which captures well the mafia’s approach to business) making someone “an offer they can’t refuse” means “do as I say or suffer the consequences,” possibly death.

Compare this to Islam’s threefold choice. On Muhammad’s orders, whenever Muslims conquer a territory in the name of Islam, its non-Muslim inhabitants are given three choices: 1) convert to Islam (“join the family”), 2) keep your religious identity but pay tribute (jizya, see below) and live as an “outsider,” a subjugated dhimmi or 3) execution.

Throughout history, converting to Islam has been an “offer” that countless non-Muslims could not refuse. In fact, this “offer” is responsible for transforming much of the Middle East and North Africa, which were Christian-majority in the 7th century when the jihad burst forth from Arabia, into the “Muslim world.”

And this offer is still alive and well today. For example, several older and disabled Christians who were not able to join the exodus out of Islamic State controlled territories opted to convert to Islam rather than die.

Like the mafia, then, Islam’s offer to conquered non-Muslims (“outsiders”) is basically “join our ‘family,’ help us and we will help you; refuse and we hurt you.”

10. The “Protection” Racket

Once the mafia takes over a territory, one of the primary ways it profits is by collecting “protection money” from its inhabitants. While the protection racket has several aspects, one in particular is akin to an Islamic practice: coercing people in the mafia’s territory to pay money for “protection,” ostensibly against outside elements; in fact, the protection bought is from the mafia itself—that is, extortion money, or pizzo. Potential “clients” who refuse to pay for the mafia’s “protection” often have their property vandalized and are routinely threatened and harassed.

Compare the collection of pizzo with the Islamic concept of jizya: The word jizya appears in Koran 9:29: “Fight those among the People of the Book [Christians and Jews] who do not believe in Allah nor the Last Day, nor forbid what Allah and his Messenger have forbidden, nor embrace the religion of truth, until they pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued (emphasis added).”

In the hadith, the Messenger of Allah, Muhammad—in our analogy, the “underboss”—regularly calls on Muslims to demand jizya from non-Muslims: “If they refuse to accept Islam,” said the prophet, “demand from them the jizya. If they agree to pay, accept it from them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay jizya, seek Allah’s help and fight them.”

The root meaning of the Arabic word “jizya” is simply to “repay” or “recompense,” basically to “compensate” for something. According to the Hans Wehr Dictionary, the standard Arabic-English dictionary, jizya is something that “takes the place” of something else, or “serves instead.”

Simply put, conquered non-Muslims were to purchase their lives, which were otherwise forfeit to their Muslim conquerors, with money. As one medieval jurist succinctly puts it, “their lives and their possessions are only protected by reason of payment of jizya” (Crucified Again, p. 22).

And to top it off, just as the mafia rationalizes its collection of “protection money” by portraying it as money that buys mafia protection against “outsiders”—when, as mentioned, the money/tribute serves only to protect the client from the mafia itself—so too do Islam’s apologists portray the collection of jizya as money meant to buy Muslim protection from outsiders, when in fact the money/jizya buys protection from Muslims themselves.

Conclusion: Mafia—What’s In a Word?

What accounts for all these similarities between Islam and the mafia? One clue is found in the fact that the very word “mafia,”which means “hostility to the law, boldness,” is derived from an Arabic word, mahya, which in translation means “bragging, boasting, bravado, and swaggering.”

This etymology is a reminder that Sicily, birthplace of the mafia, was under Arab/Islamic domination for over 200 years. Aside from a borrowed etymology, could some of the mafia’s modus operandi also have been borrowed from Islam? Isolated on their island, could native Sicilians have co-opted the techniques of social controls that they had lived under and learned from their former overlords—albeit without their Islamic veneer?

The mafia is not the only historical example of a non-Muslim criminal organization to be influenced by Islam. For example, the Thuggees — whence we get the word “thug” — were a brotherhood of allied bandits and assassins who waylaid and savagely murdered travelers in India, often by first feigning friendship. Although they were later associated with the Hindu cult of Kali, the original Thuggees were all Muslim. As late as the 19th century, a large number of Thuggees captured and convicted by the British were Muslim.

The similarities are clear: Along with assassinating his opponents, including, as seen, through treachery, Muhammad also personally engaged in banditry, ransacking the caravans of enemy tribes.

And if the words “mafia” and “thug” have Arabic/Islamic etymologies, the words “assassinate” and “assassin” are derived from a Medieval Islamic sect: the Hashashin, who pioneered the use of political assassination—with promises of a hedonistic paradise for the assassin who almost certainly died—in the name of Islam.

At any rate, when HBO personality Bill Maher recently proclaimed that Islam is “the only religion that acts like the mafia, that will f***ing kill you if you say the wrong thing, draw the wrong picture, or write the wrong book,” he was barely touching on the similarities between the mafia and other criminal organizations, and Islam.

While in most countries immigration moves the electorate to the left, in Israel immigration moved the country to the right. In the United States the left is counting on demographics to make it easier for them to win elections, but in Israel demographic shifts have made it easier for the right to win.

But the biggest problem for the Israeli left is that it’s tethered to its own version of ObamaCare in the form of the Palestinian Authority which won’t make peace, won’t stop funding terrorism and won’t stop playing the victim. As with ObamaCare, the Israeli left teeters between running on the disastrous peace process that everyone hates and pivoting away from it toward economic bread and butter issues.

For Obama and European leaders, Israel is reducible to the peace process. And the Israeli left depends on the support of foreign governments for its network of foreign funded non-profit organizations. The Israeli left can’t let go of its exploding version of ObamaCare because the left is becoming a foreign organization with limited domestic support. Its electorate isn’t in Israel; it’s in Brussels.

The Israeli left is short on ideas, both foreign and domestic, and its last remaining card is Obama.

Escalating a crisis in relations has been the traditional way for US administrations to force Israeli governments out of office. Bill Clinton did it to Netanyahu and as Israeli elections appear on the horizon Obama would love to do it all over again.

There’s only one problem.

The United States is popular in Israel, but Obama isn’t. Obama’s spats with Netanyahu ended up making the Israeli leader more popular. The plan was for Obama to gaslight Israelis by maintaining a positive image in Israel while lashing out at the Jewish State so that the blame would fall on Netanyahu.

That was what Obama’s trip to Israel had been about. While his approval ratings in Israel briefly picked up, they clattered down again over his attitude during the recent Hamas war. Polls show that the majority of Israelis don’t trust him to have their back on Islamic terrorism or Iran. And that’s bad news for him and for an Israeli left that needs to sell the image of a good Obama and a bad Netanyahu.

The foreign policy crowd is divided on whether Obama should intervene in Israel’s elections and how much. Trial balloons being floated show that Obama Inc. is at the very least willing to play coy about suggestions of sanctioning Israel. The sanctions are unlikely to ever get past Congress, but they never have to exist. Obama’s people are letting the Israeli left and their media outlet Haaretz do the heavy lifting by drawing up political doomsday scenarios and then issuing non-denial denials.

The idea is to undermine Netanyahu without getting Obama’s hands dirty. Anonymous leaks provide plausible deniability without anything that can officially be traced back to Obama. While Obama, Biden and Hillary spin the attacks as “normal disagreements between friends” for the consumption of Americans, Jewish and non-Jewish, the Israeli left warns that the relationship between America and Israel has been completely wrecked.

While Jewish Democrats have remained oblivious, as intended, these tactics have only hurt Obama’s image among the Israeli target audience. And that has strengthened Netanyahu’s image as a strong leader willing to stand up for his country’s interests.

In trying to weaken Netanyahu, Obama only made him stronger.

The Israeli left however isn’t done yet. Unpopular with the public, its members still control the police, the judiciary, the media, academia and the entertainment industry. They form the Israeli “Deep State” made up of everyone from top security officials to the media who are constantly warning about the threats to democracy from democracy, the dangers of right-wing extremism and the need to crack down on “incitement” which usually means any view that diverges from that of the left.

When it comes to elections, the left compensates for its unpopularity with fake third parties that claim to be centrist or reformist. Yesh Atid, the current incarnation of the fake third party built around an anchorman who went from high school dropout to the Minister of Finance, is sinking, but it had already fulfilled its purpose. The next incarnation of the fake third party will be headed by Moshe Kahlon.

Moshe Kahlon is a familiar figure, a defector from the conservative Likud party, a fake moderate who claims that the “extreme right” has taken over his old party. Swap out Reagan for Begin and it’s the exact same rhetoric you can hear from a Charlie Crist or a Larry Pressler.

The left may not be able to win a popularity contest, let alone a contest of ideas, but it has been agile at manipulating Israel’s multi-party system to its advantage. It doesn’t need to beat the right. It just needs to build a coalition out of fake third parties fueled by public frustration with the existing dominant parties while finding ways to splinter the right. And that’s where Obama can do the most harm.

Obama has failed at winning over Israelis, but he doesn’t need to if he can force Netanyahu to make enough concessions to destroy his image. And then the right begins to eat itself. It’s the same tactic that Obama used against Congressional Republicans. Uniting the left and dividing the right had worked well in America. Netanyahu’s willingness to compromise has lost the right without winning over anyone else.

Netanyahu may not be beatable this time around, but if his coalition can be watered down with enough leftists then it compromises his ability to get anything done while creating a ticking time bomb. New elections are the result of the ticking time bomb finally going off. The “inclusive” coalition favored by this administration last time around effectively undermined the Netanyahu government.

If a more solid conservative coalition emerges from the election then Obama will have lost. But the overall relationship would remain unchanged even if the left won.

No Israeli government can deliver the things that Obama wants because they are physically impossible. The PLO does not want peace. It will not agree to any final deal that ends all future demands on Israel and all justifications for violence against the Jewish State. And even if such a deal were reached, it would have no impact on Hamas which controls Gaza and will control the West Bank. Nor would it make the regional Muslim violence that the conflict is frequently blamed for vanish into thin air.

Even a government of the left would still be berated because there are Jews living in Jerusalem and across Israel in places that Obama disapproves of. No Israeli government could ethnically cleanse a quarter of a million Jews. And even if it did, new demands and claims of occupied territory would follow.

A government of the left can however give Obama political cover. It would avoid making statements about Iran and freely put Israeli lives at risk to meet administration demands. Its members would help Obama maintain the illusion of a friendly relationship no matter how ugly things become behind the scenes. There would be no more public tension and nothing to raise questions for American Jews.

And that’s what Obama really wants. Israel is meant to be a scapegoat in foreign affairs and a safe fundraising line for Democratic politicians. It’s supposed to take the blame for Obama’s foreign policies while posing for photos with him for Jewish audiences.

That’s where Netanyahu rocked the boat by speaking out. That’s what infuriates Obama.

Obama’s ideal Israeli government would allow itself to be berated and blamed for everything without ever speaking up in its own defense. It would be pathetically grateful for any attention from Obama. That’s all the Israeli left can offer him and it can’t even deliver that because it can’t win.

If the late Saul Alinsky—the America-hating godfather of community organizing—had fathered a black son, he’d look like Barack Obama. Obama has embraced, revered, and employed Alinsky’s philosophy and tactics of social revolution for decades. Indeed, he even taught Alinsky’s methods in community-organizing workshops and seminars in Chicago, when he was a much younger Marxist. As we witness the continuing racial unrest sparked by the shooting of Michael Brown and the Ferguson grand jury’s subsequent decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson, it is vital to understand that everything the protesters/rioters are doing—in Ferguson and elsewhere—is straight out of Alinsky’s most famous publications, Rules For Radicals and Reveille For Radicals. And Obama has encouraged them, every step of the way.

Obama and Alinsky never actually met in person, as Alinsky died when Obama was just 11 years old. Happily for the future president, by that time he had already been introduced to the man who would mentor him throughout his adolescent years—the America-hating, pro-Soviet, pro-Stalin, Communist writer Frank Marshall Davis. Thus, when Obama eventually encountered Alinsky through the latter’s writings, the young community organizer was well prepared ideologically to soak up Alinsky’s message.

In his quest to cultivate the type of chaos that would spark social revolution against America’s capitalist system, Alinsky exhorted activists to constantly “rub raw the resentments of the people” and “fan the latent hostilities to the point of overt expression”—but to do this in measured tones, so as not to “scare off” middle-class Americans.

Thus did Obama dutifully and blandly call for “unity” and calm in the immediate aftermath of Michael Brown’s “heartbreaking and tragic” death, even as he repeatedly reminded us that: “police should not be bullying or arresting” anyone without cause; “in too many communities, too many young men of color are left behind and left as objects to fear”; “there is no excuse for excessive force by police”; “the justice gap” between whites and nonwhites is unacceptable; “the criminal-justice system doesn’t treat people of all races equally”; and “too many young men of color feel targeted by law enforcement, guilty of walking while black, or driving while black, judged by stereotypes that fuel fear and resentment and hopelessness.” And when the grand jury in Ferguson subsequently chose not to indict Darren Wilson because the officer obviously had shot Michael Brown in self-defense, Obama pronounced the black community’s indignation to be “an understandable reaction.”

Obama’s carefully chosen words—all delivered in the type of nonthreatening tenor advocated by Saul Alinsky—clearly communicated a single, foundational theme to African Americans: In the racist cesspool known as the United States, black people are routinely treated like second-class citizens, if not subhumans. Oh, and by the way, please remain calm. Wink, wink.

Alinsky also taught that in some cases activists must be completely willing—for the sake of the moral principles in whose name they profess to act—to turn up the proverbial heat and watch society descend into chaos and anarchy; to “go into a state of complete confusion and draw [their] opponent into the vortex of the same confusion.” “Wherever possible,” Alinsky counseled, “go outside the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.”

Mobs of shouting protesters can accomplish that objective quite effectively—even if, as in the present case, they are oblivious to the irony that the poster-child of their crusade is a multiple felon who tried unsuccessfully to murder a police officer. Such demonstrations tend to give onlookers the impression that a mass movement is not only well underway, but may actually be preparing to shift into an even higher gear at any moment. A “mass impression,” said Alinsky, can be lasting and intimidating. Thus did President Obama recently meet at the White House with Al Sharpton, his leading advisor on race-related matters, and other protest leaders from Ferguson, urging them to “stay on course” with their activism.

Yet another highly noteworthy observation by Alinsky was this: “Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.” “The threat,” he explained, “is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.” Thus, “if your organization is small in numbers,… raise a din and clamor that will make the listener believe that your organization numbers many more than it does.”

This can be well achieved by orchestrating a host of simultaneous demonstrations in multiple cities or venues, exactly as the highly organized Gentle Giant crusade has been doing. The stature of these rallies is magnified by the fact that they receive lots of media attention, while scores of millions of ordinary Americans who view them with contempt and dread are busy quietly going about their lives, caring for their families, working at their jobs, and pursuing their personal aspirations as they see fit. Such people are many thousands of times more numerous than the perpetually aggrieved rabble-rousers of the Left, but Alinsky understood—as Obama understands today—that a spraying skunk inevitably gets all the attention when it intrudes unexpectedly upon a picnic.

The America-hating Alinsky also taught that activists, in order to cast themselves as defenders of high-minded principles, must theatrically convey “shock, horror, and moral outrage” whenever any of their demands—however inconsequential—are not met. And no one conveys such emotions more convincingly than Obama’s aforementioned racial “advisor,” Al Sharpton, who vows to continue the Michael Brown/anti-police brutality crusade until the end of time if necessary. Alinsky understood quite well that even a pathetic moral degenerate like Sharpton can be an effective revolutionary if he is skilled in the otherwise worthless arts of bluster and righteous indignation.

Lest anyone think there might be a way to bridge the gap between civil society and the revolutionaries in the vanguard of the current Gentle Giant Brigades, a dose of reality is in order: Alinsky emphasized that the overarching objective of any crusade is never to promote peace or reconciliation, but rather to be unwaveringly “dedicated to an eternal war” in which “there are no rules of fair play” and “no compromise” whatsoever; to mercilessly “pulverize” people with “fear”; and ultimately to “force their capitulation.”

We got a glimpse of this mindset recently when we learned that two New Black Panther Party members were plotting not only to blow up St. Louis’s famed Gateway Arch, but also to assassinate Ferguson police chief Tom Jackson and the city’s prosecuting attorney Bob McCulloch. And a shrieking Louis Farrakhan, for his part, has been busy urging black Americans to throw Molotov cocktails at white people in order to fulfill a scriptural “law of retaliation”; condemning whites for allegedly “killing us” in large numbers; and warning that “we’ll tear this goddamn country up!”

Like all Marxists, Obama, Sharpton, Farrakhan, and the rest of their fellow revolutionaries seek to tear society apart by pitting the “races,” the “classes,” and the “genders” against one another—“rubbing raw” their respective “resentments” until hatred abounds in every person’s heart and mayhem fills the streets. Michael Brown’s corpse is merely a building block for these rabble rousers. They know that someday another African American will be killed by a white police officer and thus be anointed as their movement’s next martyred saint. Bit by bit, the inconvenient fact that Brown was a violent, abusive criminal whose death was brought about entirely by his own actions will be airbrushed out of public memory. And the grievance mongers of the “civil rights” movement will wistfully remember him as just another innocent black victim whose life was tragically cut short by white depravity.

That is the King James translation of the sixth commandment. It is a magnificent translation. But this one has led to much moral confusion.

Yesterday, PragerUniversity.com, which has had more than 20 million views this year, released 11 courses (each five-minutes long) — the Ten Commandments and an introduction.

The reason we made these video courses is that I believe that everything we need to make a good world and rid ourselves of evil is contained in the Ten Commandments.

For the next few weeks, my column will be selected transcripts of the courses, all of which I present.

Whatever your faith, or if you have no faith, I invite you to watch the videos at www.prageru.com — from the introduction through the tenth, or any of the Ten. They are cleverly animated with text and graphics.

Here is the text of commandment six — explaining why the King James translation is wrong:

You would think that of all the Ten Commandments the one that needs the least explaining is the sixth, because it seems so clear. It is the one that the King James Bible, the most widely used English translation of the Bible, translates as, “Thou shall not kill.”

Yet, the truth is the quite the opposite. This is probably the least well understood of the Ten Commandments. The reason is that the Hebrew original does not say, “Do not kill.” It says, “Do not murder.” Both Hebrew and English have two words for taking a life — one is “kill” (harag, in Hebrew) and the other is “murder” (ratzach in Hebrew).

The difference between the two is enormous. Kill means:

1) Taking any life — whether of a human being or an animal.

2) Taking a human life deliberately or by accident.

3) Taking a human life legally or illegally, morally or immorally.

On the other hand, murder can only mean one thing: The illegal or immoral taking of a human life. That’s why we say, “I killed a mosquito,” not, “I murdered a mosquito.” And that’s why we would say that “the worker was accidentally killed,” not that “the worker was accidentally murdered.”

So why did the King James translation of the Bible use the word “kill” rather than “murder”? Because 400 years ago, when the translation was made, “kill” was synonymous with “murder.” As a result, some people don’t realize that English has changed since 1610 and therefore think that the Ten Commandments prohibits all killing.

But, of course, it doesn’t. If the Ten Commandments forbade killing, we would all have to be vegetarians, as killing animals would be prohibited. And we would all have to be pacifists — since we could not kill even in self-defense.

However, you don’t have to know how the English language has evolved to understand that the Ten Commandments could not have prohibited all killing.

The very same part of the Bible that contains the Ten Commandments — the Five Books of Moses, the Torah as it is known by Jews — commands the death penalty for murder, allows killing in war, prescribes animal sacrifice and allows eating meat.

A correct understanding of the commandment against murder is crucial because, while virtually every modern translation correctly translates the commandment as “Do not murder,” many people cite the King James translation to justify two positions that have no biblical basis: opposition to capital punishment and pacifism.

Regarding capital punishment and the Bible, as I note in my Prager University course on capital punishment, the only law that appears in each one of the Five Books of Moses is that murderers be put to death. Opponents of the death penalty are free to hold the view that all murderers should be allowed to live. But they are not free to cite the Bible to support their view.

Yet, many do. And they always cite the Commandment, “Do not kill.” But that, as should now be abundantly clear, is not what the commandment says, and it is therefore an invalid argument.

As regards pacifism, the belief that it is always wrong to kill a human being, again, anyone is free to hold this position, as immoral as it may be. And what other word than “immoral” can one use to describe forbidding the killing of someone who is in the process of murdering innocent men, women and children, in, let’s say, a movie theater or a school?

But it is dishonest to cite the commandment against murder to justify pacifism.

There is moral killing — most obviously when done in self-defense against an aggressor — and there is immoral killing. And the word for that is “murder.”

The Ten Commandments are portrayed on two tablets. The five commandments on the second tablet all concern our treatment of fellow human beings.

The first one on that list is “Do not murder.” Why? Because murder is the worst act a person can commit. The other four commandments — prohibiting stealing, adultery, giving false testimony and coveting, are all serious offenses.

But murder leads the list because deliberately taking the life of an innocent person is the most terrible thing we can do. That is why it is so important to understand that the commandment prohibits murder, not all killing. When people liken killing in self-defense to murder — such as when they equate killing the terrorist who is murdering people with the murders that the terrorist is committing — all they are doing is reducing the evil that murder is. And when they use the Ten Commandments to justify that position, all they are doing is making the Ten Commandments, the moral foundation of Western Civilization, morally irrelevant.

The next time you hear someone cite, “Do not kill” when quoting the sixth commandment, gently but firmly explain that it actually says, “Do not murder.”

Rush Limbaugh correctly observed today on his radio show that Charles Barkley is probably the only man in America who can say whatever he chooses about race, and will experience zero blowback from the media:

Abdallah Bulgasem Zehaf-Bibeau, the crackhead turned Jihadist spawned by the mating of a Canadian immigration official and a Libyan Muslim Jihadist, just wanted peace.

He told a co-worker, “There can’t be world peace until there’s only Muslims.” Then he tried to usher in peace, the Islamic way, by opening fire near the Canadian parliament.

Meanwhile in Israel a reporter interviewing Arab Muslim settlers in Jerusalem found that they too wanted peace. On their terms.

“Yes we want peace,” one of them said, “but peace means no Jews.”

When negotiating peace with other cultures it’s a good idea to make sure that the words you are using mean the same thing. Most Muslims and Westerners want peace. But to Westerners peace means co-existence. To Muslims, peace means the end of your existence.

Ideas carry heavy cultural baggage. Peace in the West summons up images of Armistice Day, of the Christmas Truce of WW1 in which French, German and English soldiers could share meals and play soccer together. It carries with it the subversive idea that both sides realize the war isn’t worth fighting.

Such a subversive idea has no place in Islam. The Jihad is at the heart of Islam. To question the holy war is to also question the faith. When war is religion then peace through setting aside war is heresy.

The Western idea of peace is a wholly alien one to Islam. In Islam, peace does not come from men transcending their differences, but from destroying men who think and live differently. That is the function of the religious police of our allied “moderate Muslim” countries who seek out the practice of other religions and other ways of living in places like Saudi Arabia and suppress their practitioners.

Islamic peace does not come from diversity, from accepting the existence of other nations, religions and peoples, but from unity through Islam and eliminating as many differences as possible. If Islam is the source of peace, then all that which is “not Islam” is the cause of war.

Kill the Jews. Kill the Christians. Then there will be peace.

The Islamic idea of peace was aptly expressed by Zehaf-Bibeau and our anonymous Jerusalem Jihadist. It is not based on a recognition of the humanity of one’s fellow man, but on a rejection of their humanity.

As Mohammed curtly put it in missives to the leaders of non-Muslim countries in the region, “Aslim, Taslam.” Convert to Islam and you’ll have peace. The same message has been dispatched by Muslim leaders today to popes and presidents. It’s a message of peace on the only terms that Islam allows.

Islam is the religion of peace. For there to be peace, Islam must be supreme. Within the Islamic worldview, conflict is caused by the existence of dissent. The only way to achieve peace is by forcing the submission of every human being to the correct strain of Islam. “Moderates” may agree to let Jews and Christians live as inferior second-class citizens if they submit to Muslims. “Extremists” will skip straight to raping and beheading them. And once that ugly business is done, there will be peace.

Or there will be peace once the “moderates” and “extremists” have finished killing each other, once the Sunnis and Shiites have finished beheading each other, and once every single Muslim has finished slaughtering every other Muslim who in any way dissents from his understanding of Islam.

That’s the brand of peace we’re seeing in Iraq and Syria today. Or the peace process between Israel and the Arab Muslims who were rebranded as “Palestinians” because it made them seem like a local flavor.

Islam rejects the idea that mutual empathy should transcend conflict. Instead it believes that war should transcend humanity. Or as the Koran puts it, “Warfare is ordained for you, though it is hateful unto you; but it may happen that ye hate a thing which is good for you, and it may happen that ye love a thing which is bad for you. Allah knoweth, ye know not.”

The Western tradition is biased toward the peace of co-existence. It applies the logic of armistice toward all areas of life leading to the championing of multiculturalism and immigration. Its siren song is John Lennon’s Imagine with its call for an end to borders, nations, religions and property. Its ideal of peace comes from the end of structure and separation between people.

The Islamic idea of peace however affirms a structure and separation based on the Koran. It believes that there will be peace when everyone is forced to live within the strictures of Islam. And therefore there can be no genuine peace with non-Muslims who do not submit to Islam.

These two incompatible notions of peace continue to collide. Imagine if French soldiers had clambered out to sing and play soccer only to be gunned down by German soldiers who had a fundamentally different idea of peace. This was actually how WW2 was shaped as the victorious side played by outdated rules while Nazi Germany, Japan and the USSR shifted to a thoroughly totalitarian mentality.

Munich was a disaster because Hitler was not the Kaiser. The other side was no longer willing to play by any rules, even in diplomatic negotiations, or to accept anything short of total victory. The Allies were forced to match their enemies in a ruthless war that saw entire cities destroyed.

The Nazis and Communists were the products of years of indoctrination that taught them to see opponents as less than human and peace as being obtainable only through their destruction. Japan, which had a longer history of dehumanizing outsiders, proved to be an even tougher nut to crack.

Islam has a history of over a thousand years of continuously dehumanizing non-Muslims and identifying peace and their enslavement as one and the same. It is impossible to live in peace with Muslims who think that there can be no peace as long as non-Muslims continue to live independent lives.

In the Muslim worldview, war happens because non-Muslims exist. War is caused by the infidel, the disbeliever and the Muslim hypocrite who does not truly commit to the practice of Islam. The Jihad purifies the world of non-Muslims; it eradicates the “moderate” Muslims who have been compromised by Western culture. It is a war of extermination against the un-Islamic.

When Westerners propose peace, Muslims reject them as hypocrites for speaking of peace, but refusing to accept the only religion that can bring peace. They feel no obligation to honor any peace agreements since peace can only come from Islam and the Western rejection of Islam proves our deceitfulness and bad intentions. This dynamic is inherent in the Koran and the entire history of Islam.

Islam does not obtain peace through peace, but through war. It seeks a world without conflict by killing anyone who might disagree with its totalitarian ideology.

Proposing the peace of co-existence to an ideology to which peace means its own supremacy is a foolish and deranged act. Our outreach to the Muslim world does not lack for a common language, but for common ideas. Both sides may speak of peace, but for one side peace really means war.

Languages are not only made up of words, but of values. It is not enough to bring a dictionary to a negotiation if the two parties are reading from different moral and ethical traditions. Just because we translate “Salaam” as peace and agree that we both want peace does not mean that we have the same idea of what peace is.

The West sees peace as living side by side with Muslims. Muslims see peace as the end of the West.

Another strategy suggested by Rush Limbaugh (with which I agree fully) is for the Republicans to pass a bill legalizing all the aliens Obama has done with his amnesty action, BUT with two addenda: 1) Fully secure the Mexican/U.S. border, and 2) A stipulation that none of these people under ANY circumstances will have the right to vote for 20 years hence.

Brilliant suggestion in my opinion - because it will expose the Democrats' ACTUAL reason for wanting this amnesty. Obama will NEVER sign such a bill.

The riot in Ferguson reminds me, I hate criminals, but I hate liberals more. They planned this riot. They stoked the fire, lied about the evidence and produced a made-to-order riot.

Every other riot I’ve ever heard of was touched off by some spontaneous event that exploded into mob violence long before any media trucks arrived. This time, the networks gave us a countdown to the riot, as if it were a Super Bowl kickoff.

From the beginning, Officer Darren Wilson’s shooting of Michael Brown wasn’t reported like news. It was reported like a cause.

The media are in a huff about the prosecutor being “biased” because his father was a cop, who was shot and killed by an African-American. What an assh@le!

Evidently, the sum-total of what every idiot on TV knows about the law is Judge Sol Wachtler’s 20-year-old joke that a prosecutor could “indict a ham sandwich.” We’re supposed to be outraged that this prosecutor didn’t indict the ham sandwich of Darren Wilson.

Liberals seem not to understand that they don’t have a divine right to ruin someone’s life and bankrupt him with a criminal trial, just so they’re satisfied.

The reason most grand jury investigations result in an indictment is that most grand juries aren’t convened solely to patronize racial mobs. Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon was basically demanding an indictment of Wilson before Big Mike’s body was cold. It was only because of racial politics that this shooting wasn’t dismissed without a grand jury, at all.

Obama says anger is an “understandable reaction” to the grand jury’s finding. Why? And why — as almost everyone is saying — are we supposed to praise the “peaceful protests”?

There’s nothing to protest! A cop shot a thug who was trying to kill him. The grand jury documents make perfectly clear that Big Mike was entirely responsible for his own death. Can’t the peaceful protesters read?

The night of the riot, Obama said the law “often feels as if it is being applied in discriminatory fashion.” Maybe, but not in this case — except toward Officer Wilson.

I know liberals were hoping they had finally found the great white whale of racism, but they’re just going to have to keep plugging away. They might want to come up with a more productive way to spend their time, inasmuch as they’re about 0:100 on white racism sightings.

Anyone following this case has seen the video of Big Mike robbing a store and roughing up an innocent Pakistani clerk about 10 minutes before being shot by Officer Wilson. They’ve seen him flashing Bloods gang signs in photos.

They know Brown’s mother was recently arrested for clubbing grandma with a pipe over T-shirt proceeds. They’ve seen the video of Brown’s ex-con stepfather shouting at a crowd of protesters after the grand jury’s decision: “Burn this bitch down!”

Liberals will say none of that is relevant in court, but apparently they don’t think actual evidence is relevant either. It’s certainly relevant in the court of public opinion that the alleged victims are a cartoonishly lower-class, periodically criminal black family.

TV hosts narrated the riot by saying it showed “the community” feels it’s not being listened to. Only liberals look at blacks looting and say, See what white Americans made them do?

That’s their proof of injustice — look at how blacks are reacting! (While I don’t approve of the looting part, I do approve of the whole throwing-bottles-at-CNN part.)

The looters aren’t the community!

The community doesn’t want black thugs robbing stores and sauntering down the middle of its streets. The community doesn’t want to be assaulted by Big Mike. The community didn’t want its stores burned down.

That community testified in support of Officer Darren Wilson. About a half-dozen black witnesses supported Officer Wilson’s version of what happened. One was a black woman, who saw the shooting from the Canfield Green apartments. Crying on the stand, she said, “I have a child and that could have been my son.”

And yet, she confirmed all crucial parts of Wilson’s account. She said “the child” (292-pound Big Mike) never had his hands up and the cop only fired when “the baby” was coming at him. “Why won’t that boy stop?” she asked her husband.

I always want to know more about the heroic black witnesses. They are put in a position no white person will ever be in and do the right thing by telling the truth — then go into hiding from “the community” being championed by goo-goo liberals.

White people don’t feel any obligation to defend some thug just because he’s white. Only blacks are expected to lie on behalf of criminals of their own race.

But real heroism doesn’t interest liberals. They only ooh-and-ahh over blacks with rap sheets. The only meaningful white racism anymore is the liberal infantilization of black people.

And so the whirlwind, cultivated by Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Al Sharpton, the mainstream media and the army of thugs they enabled, is now being reaped. As the result of a St. Louis County grand jury refusing to indict officer Darren Wilson for the shooting death of Michael Brown, Ferguson, MO has become Ground Zero, in what irresponsible Missouri State Sen. Maria Chappelle-Nadali referred to on MSNBC as “St. Louis’s race war.”

One of the race war’s architects pleaded for calm shortly after the decision was announced. Yet even as Obama spoke about that “need for calm” and that there was “no excuse for violence,” he insisted, “We have to try to understand” the anger of those who demanded nothing less than a murder charge absent an ounce of evidence as an “understandable reaction” from people who believe “the law is being applied in a discriminatory fashion.”

Where did those people get that belief? Leave it to Obama to omit that critical information — the same President Obama who met with protest leaders and Sharpton on Nov. 5 at the White House. It was at that unscheduled meeting the president was ostensibly “concerned about Ferguson staying on course in terms of pursuing what it was that he knew we were advocating,” according to Sharpton. “He said he hopes that we’re doing all we can to keep peace.”

One is left to marvel at one of two realities. Either we have a president so utterly naive he believes a hoax-perpetrating, riot-inciting Al Sharpton, who denigrated the grand jury process, pre-organized protest rallies in 25 American cities, and uses his MSNBC platform to fire up racial unrest, is a man of peace. Or the president, who once urged his Latino followers to “punish our enemies,” remains as wedded to the same racial “us against them” mentality as America’s foremost racial arsonist. Is it really possible to believe the former?

Despite Obama’s superficial condemnations of violence, at least 25 businesses were set ablaze, many of which are total losses—and most of which were minority owned. Ten cars were burned at a dealership, and a “lot of gunfire,” as Ferguson Asst. Fire Chief Steve Fair put it, made maintaining control of the streets highly problematic, if not impossible. Reporters were assaulted, the store Michael Brown robbed prior to his confrontation with Wilson was looted, and at least 61 people have been arrested. “What I’ve seen tonight is probably much worse than the worst night we ever had in August, and that’s truly unfortunate,” said St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar Monday at a 1:30 a.m press conference. Belmar further noted that there was “nothing left” along West Florissant between Solway Avenue and Chambers Road, that he heard at least 150 gun shots, and that he was surprised he and Missouri Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson, who “got lit up,” as they drove through the area, weren’t hit by that gunfire.

“We talked about peaceful protest, and that did not happen tonight,” Johnson said. “We definitely have done something here that’s going to impact our community for a long time…that’s not how we create change.”

Sharpton continued to stir the pot, criticizing Democratic Prosecutor Bob McCulloch’s handling of the case, and demanding to know who voted for or against indicting Wilson, even though the law prohibits that information from being released. Sharpton’s motives are transparent. The grand jury was comprised of nine white and three black jurors, seven of whom were men, and five of whom were women. Agreement by nine of 12 jurors was necessary to file criminal charges, and there is no doubt Sharpton was attempting to exacerbate the racial divide with the implication that race was the over-riding, if not sole, factor in the decision.

The grand jury met 25 times over the course of three months and heard testimony from 60 witnesses. They contemplated charges ranging from first-degree murder to involuntary manslaughter, and the bar for indictment was “probable cause,” not the far more onerous standard of determining “beyond a reasonable doubt” whether a crime had been committed. A plethora of evidence from the proceedings was released, demonstrating how the jury came to the conclusions it did. It included testimony from Wilson himself, physical evidence, and other eyewitness testimony, including some from black Americans who corroborated Wilson’s version of events. ”They determined that no probable cause exists to file any charge against Officer Wilson, and returned a ‘No True Bill’ on each of the five indictments,” explained McCulloch.

None of it mattered to the mob—or seemingly the media either. McCulloch faced a hostile press during his post-announcement interview, one that has characterized that interview as “bizarre,” no doubt in response to his contention the media’s “insatiable appetite for something, for anything to talk about, following closely behind with the non-stop rumors on social media,” contributed to the firestorm surrounding this case.

That would be the same media that initially lionized Brown’s friend, Dorian Johnson, whose thoroughly debunked eyewitness testimony about Brown being shot in the back while holding his hands up in surrender, epitomized the sensationalism that ignited the national firestorm. Johnson’s lie propelled much of the violence and unrest that followed, initiating the “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” meme that remains prevalent to this day. It was the same media that perpetrated the “gentle giant” meme to describe the 6’4’’ nearly 300-pound Brown, only to see it undone by his participation in a strong-arm robbery of a much smaller store owner just prior to his confrontation with Wilson. It was the media who leaked information during the grand jury proceedings, drawing a rebuke from an “exasperated” Holder, despite the reality that MSNBC, The New York Times and the Daily Caller all cited the administration and the Justice Department itself as sources of those leaks. That would be the same Eric Holder who ginned up mistrust of the police when he spoke to 50 community leaders, not just as Attorney General of the United States, but “as a black man” who remembers how “angry” he was when police stopped him for speeding on the New Jersey Turnpike.

That would also be the same Eric Holder, who like his efforts in the Trayvon Martin case, initiated two separate DOJ investigations, one of potential civil rights violations allegedly committed by Wilson, and the other regarding practices of the Ferguson police force. “While the grand jury proceeding in St. Louis County has concluded, the Justice Department’s investigation into the shooting of Michael Brown remains ongoing,” he said. “In addition, the Department continues to investigate allegations of unconstitutional policing patterns or practices by the Ferguson Police Department.”

As for social media, the Twitterverse is currently inundated with calls for the murder of Officer Wilson.

Thus it is unsurprising the protests have spread beyond Ferguson. In Oakland, CA, hundreds of protesters bearing signs that read “The People Say Guilty!” and “Missouri, Palestine, Justice Now!” (an illuminating linkage to say the least) blocked a major highway and other streets, starting fires, breaking the window of a bank, and spray painting a police cruiser with graffiti. In New York City, three bridges were blocked, there were marchers in Times Square and the Police Commissioner had fake blood thrown at him. A total of 90 cities across the nation were besieged by protesters who were seemingly united by a trio of themes: Michael Brown was innocent, Darren Wilson was guilty, and police departments deliberately and disproportionately target black America.

And once again, a mainstream media still interested in fanning the racialist flames is leading the way. The same CNN that ripped the heavy police presence in Ferguson last August is the CNN whose morning co-anchor Michaela Pereira spoke about the community’s “frustration the police didn’t do more to protect those businesses.” Vox columnist Ezra Klein, who apparently considers himself more knowledgable than the grand jury, penned a column whose title says it all: “Officer Darren Wilson’s story is unbelievable. Literally.” Why? “None of this fits with what we know of Michael Brown,” Klein insists, even as he admits the encounter with Wilson happened shortly after the aforementioned robbery. Salon.com pushed the envelope to the max, declaring the jury’s decision “reaffirmed what we already knew: America is a white supremacist state.”

Even Brown’s immediate family, who initially expressed “profound disappointment with the decision, but asked that the protests “be kept peaceful,” had their wishes undermined by stepfather Louis Head. Shortly after the decision was reached, he urged the crowd 10 times to “burn this bitch down.”

Those four words aptly describe the agenda of those with a vested interest in keeping Americans divided, angry and completely convinced the nation is a cesspool of racism where law enforcement must be considered the “enemy.” A nation where there are no longer irrefutable facts backed by witnesses and evidence, but a nation where reason and truth can only be determined after the filter of race is applied. One where the narrative must be served, even when that narrative assumes the characteristics of a lynch mob calling for the death of a police officer.

It is a narrative that dismisses the reality of a disproportionate amount of homicides and other crimes committed by black Americans (overwhelmingly against other black Americans) relative to their population, even as it has long glorified the thug culture that engenders most of it. It is the narrative that demands police forces who “reflect the racial demography of the community,” even as many black Americans have been “taught from the time that you could speak, from the time that you could understand speech, that police are to be feared and that they’re part of an occupying force that is there to circumvent the democratic processes and to strip you of your rights,” according to Phillip Atiba Goff, co-founder and president of the Center for Policing Equity at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Saddest of all, it is the narrative supported by a president whose track record extends from his past with Rev. Jeremiah Wright and his racist rantings and assertions the Cambridge police “acted stupidly” when they arrested Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., to his efforts to exacerbate racial discord during and after the Trayvon Martin saga. He is joined by an Attorney General who believes Americans are a “nation of cowards” when it comes to discussing race, one who insists voter ID is tantamount to “black disenfranchisement,” and continues to run the most racially polarized DOJ in recent history.

Even worse, both men have unduly elevated the status of race huckster Al Sharpton, showing up at National Action Network (NAN) galas to sing his praises. That odious reality is tantamount to a Republican president showing up at a meeting of the European-American Unity and Rights Organization and singing the praises of its white supremacist founder, David Duke. The fact that such as comparison is never made obscures the depths of the racial polarization embraced by the nations’s top two law enforcement officials. It is both an ongoing tragedy and a national disgrace that will only be assuaged when Sharpton and every other person who profits from the misery of millions is ejected from the national stage.

Until then, America will seethe. Well-meaning Americans on both sides of the color line will tread warily, remaining ultimately distrustful of each other, lest they be branded sellouts to “the cause.” The mob and its media enablers will continue to foment violence, looting, death and destruction, based largely on the notion that such mayhem is a “reasonable” price to be extracted from an irredeemably racist nation in need of “fundamental transformation.” One family will mourn for a son who could not resist the siren song of thug culture, while another family will continue to live in terror perhaps forever, or at least until the mob finds another bogeyman at whom it can channel its orchestrated blood-lust. The thin blue line that separates America from the anarchists will be stretched to its limits.

And the promise of a post-racial society that once propelled this president into the White House now more closely resembles the division and racialist bean-counting that epitomizes the community organizer mindset. In short, hope and change is going up in flames in Ferguson, MO.

Grand jurors in Ferguson, Mo., refused to indict local police officer Darren Wilson yesterday, heroically resisting pressure from President Obama on down to lynch an innocent police officer who fought off a violent attacker.

The decision is infuriating left-wingers across America because it rebuts the underlying assumption they embrace which is that white police racism caused the death of Michael Brown, a young black thug who tried to seize Wilson’s gun in an attempt to do the officer harm.

As fresh rioting was already underway in the St. Louis area, the decision also angered President Obama who could barely contain his hostility in a disgraceful, unprecedented television appearance following the release of the announcement about the non-indictments. Obama urged activists to refrain from using violence. The president himself bears direct responsibility for fomenting the combustible situation, however.

The county’s elected prosecuting attorney, Robert McCulloch, calmly explained the process in detail last night that the grand jury employed in choosing not to return indictments in five potential charges from first-degree murder to lesser offenses.

McCulloch is a white Democrat who has come under heavy fire from race-baiting members of his own political party. His partisans hate him because he does not share their antipathy for police officers, and presumably, because he is the wrong color. McCulloch easily secured the Democratic nomination for his office in a primary election four days before Brown was killed. In that contest, he handily beat former state public defender Leslie T. Broadnax, a black woman, by a margin of 71.4 percent to 28.6 percent.

McCulloch said many witnesses gave testimony that was not believable. Witnesses fabricated events, admitted they were in error, clung to discredited factual accounts, or gave evidence inconsistent with the physical evidence.

McCulloch said grand jurors were “the only people who heard every witness … and every piece of evidence.”

“These grand jurors poured their hearts and soul into this process,” he said. The grand jury consisted of nine whites and three blacks and was meeting every week since Aug. 20 to hear evidence in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown. The panel convened for 70 hours and heard from 60 witnesses.

Perhaps in a conciliatory gesture to those who wanted Wilson strung up, McCulloch referred to the death of Brown and the events surrounding it as tragic. Obama too used the word tragic.

But that is the wrong word.

Recall that Brown, an 18-year-old black male, was killed in Ferguson, Mo., on Aug. 9 by white police officer Darren Wilson after he attacked Wilson and tried to grab his handgun. Brown’s defenders characterize him as a gentle giant even though a few minutes earlier he was captured on video committing a strong-arm robbery at a convenience store, roughing up a much smaller clerk in the process. At autopsy Brown’s height was 6′ 5″ and his weight was 289 lbs. As previously reported, autopsy results were consistent with witness accounts that Brown reached for Wilson’s gun during their fateful altercation.

Brown’s death was not tragic. He was a villain. The evidence shows that he initiated potentially deadly force against an officer of the law and suffered the consequences of his actions. Grand jurors only needed a little bit of evidence to indict Officer Wilson. The evidence needed only to establish that probable cause existed to charge Wilson with a crime. The prosecution couldn’t even satisfy that low legal bar. The Wilson case may never have made it to a grand jury at all were it not for the antics of left-wing racial grievance groups working with and taking directions from the Obama administration.

The decision not to indict Wilson is not a tragedy. Far from it. The decision is just, proof that the grand jury system that was created to prevent governments from railroading unpopular defendants still works.

The tragedy is that Wilson had to be subjected to a three-month-long circus in which he was wrongfully accused of being a racist, murdering cop. He was demonized in the media day in and day out, a process that continues in the nation’s newsrooms even after last night’s announcement.

Petulant, as America’s childish Commander-in-Chief is wont to be when he fails to get his way, Obama sounded angry that grand jurors failed to indict Officer Wilson. The plot by Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, and Obama operative Al Sharpton to lynch Wilson in the courts failed.

Coming across like a Latin American caudillo, Obama sounded disgusted with Ferguson police and police forces across the nation in a press briefing last night.

Instead of accepting the grand jury’s wise decision, Obama set about stoking the flames. After spending months stirring up racial antagonism, Obama pontificated as if an innocent bystander of the events.

The decision “was going to be subject of intense disagreement not only in Ferguson, but across America, so I want to just say a few words suggesting how we might move forward,” he said, without noting that Wilson’s use of justifiable force against Brown became a national issue at his instigation.

Ignoring the fact that the death of Michael Brown had everything to do with his threatening, abusive behavior and absolutely nothing to do with his race, Obama implied cops hate minorities.

“We need to recognize that the situation in Ferguson speaks to broader challenges that we still face as a nation,” Obama said, even though no broader challenges that we face as a nation played a role in Brown’s death.

“The fact is, in too many parts of this country, a deep distrust exists between law enforcement and communities of color,” he said, without noting that he and his comrades-in-arms in the world of community organizing have created distrust and disharmony where none previously existed.

“Some of this is the result of the legacy of racial discrimination in this country,” Obama said even though there is no evidence that the residue of racial discrimination played any role in Brown’s death.

“And this is tragic, because nobody needs good policing more than poor communities with higher crime rates,” Obama said. “The good news is we know there are things we can do to help, and I’ve instructed Attorney General Holder to work with cities across the country to help build better relations between communities and law enforcement.” Obama said this even though the case at hand provided no evidence that there is a problem between communities and law enforcement.

The president then pivoted to make a pitch for affirmative action in police departments:

That means working with law enforcement officials to make sure their ranks are representative of the communities they serve. We know that makes a difference. It means working to train officials so that law enforcement conducts itself in a way that is fair to everybody. It means enlisting the community actively on what should be everybody’s goal, and that is to prevent crime.

These are mere policing platitudes Obama is lip-syncing as he advances the notion that only black police officers are suited to work in black communities. We do not know that it makes a difference. In fact, enforced diversity can be deadly.

We know that in the rush to furnish communities with cops of the correct skin color corners are likely to get cut and people will die as a result. Economist John Lott found in a 2000 study that the apartheid approach to police staffing led to increases in violent crime, especially in black neighborhoods. This is because the forced lowering of standards put less-qualified officers of all skin colors on the streets.

Even though the justice system ultimately worked in Ferguson, Obama pretends there is still a problem because there aren’t enough blacks in the local constabulary, in his view. He urged communities “interested in working with this administration and local and state officials to start tackling much-needed criminal justice reform,” even though the Brown-Wilson saga does not prove any reform of the criminal justice system is needed.

Obama continued ignoring the facts, insisting there is a problem.

“We have made enormous progress in race relations over the course of the past several decades … but what is also true is that there are still problems and communities of color aren’t just making these problems up,” Obama said, again ignoring that there is no evidence of a problem.

“Those who are only interested in focusing on the violence and just want the problem to go away need to recognize that we do have work to do here, and we shouldn’t try to paper it over,” he said without proving there is any work to be done. “Whenever we do that, the anger may momentarily subside, but over time, it builds up and America isn’t everything that it could be.”

It is as if the psychosis our troubled president suffers from regarding Ebola, the virus Obama is lovingly importing from West Africa, has spread to other issues as well. Only Obama and his fellow travelers say there is a problem in Ferguson.

The mass hysteria over Michael Brown’s death that Obama and his allies generated continues.

[To order David Horowitz’s new book, “The Black Book of the American Left, Volume III: The Great Betrayal,” click here.]

Start with Obama’s claim that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (or ISIS) is not Islamic. Say what? In fact, the so-called war on terror is clearly a war that Islamic jihadists have declared on us. Yet Obama is so hostile to this war that even the subterfuge “war on terror” was too much for him and he purged it from official government statements and replaced it with “Overseas Contingency Operations,” which describes nothing. Why would he do this? To avoid confronting the actual threat from what is obviously the most dynamic movement in Islam today: the jihadist war to purge the world of infidels and establish a global Islamic state. The same impulse to deny this threat can be seen in the Obama administration’s characterization of domestic acts of Islamic terror like the recent beheading in Oklahoma and the Fort Hood massacre as “workplace violence.”

The origin of the Democratic lies that fog the nature of the war against the Islamists and make us vulnerable to their attacks can be traced to the Democrats’ defection from the war in Iraq, the second front in the so-called “war on terror.” “Bush Lied People Died.” This was the disgusting charge with which progressives and Democrats sought successfully to demonize America’s commander-in-chief and demoralize the nation as it went to war to take down the terrorist-supporting monster regime of Saddam Hussein and eventually defeat Ansar-al-Islam and al-Qaeda in Iraq. In fact, Bush didn’t lie about the reasons for taking on the terrorist regime in Iraq, as the Democrats claimed. Democrats, including senators John Kerry and Diane Feinstein sat on the intelligence committees and had access to every piece of data about Saddam Hussein’s weapons and the reasons for going to war that George Bush did. If they had any doubts about these reasons all they had to do was pick up the phone to CIA director George Tenet – a Bill Clinton appointee – and ask him. The reprehensible claim that Bush lied was concocted by Democrats to justify their defection from a war they had just authorized betraying their country in time of war along with the young men and women they had sent into the battlefield.

The Democrats lied in claiming that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and that therefore the war was unnecessary and therefore immoral. This was actually two lies in one. In the first place the decision to go to war wasn’t about Saddam’s possession of weapons of mass destruction. It was about his determination to build and use weapons of mass destruction and his violation of 17 Security Council resolutions designed to stop him from doing just that. Saddam violated all 17 of the UN resolutions, beginning with those that constituted the Gulf War Truce and culminating in the ultimatum to disclose and destroy all his weapons of mass destruction. His defiance of that ultimatum is why we went to war with him.

But it was the second lie – that Saddam did not have weapons of mass destruction – that the Democrats used to discredit the president and the war we were fighting. In fact, the Saddam regime did have weapons of mass destruction, including a chemical weapons storage plant recently discovered by ISIS along with 2200 rockets filled with deadly Sarin gas. Here’s the report from the Daily News of July 9, 2014:

“A terrorist group bent on turning Iraq into an Islamic state has seized a chemical weapons depot near Baghdad stockpiled with sarin-filled rockets left over from the Saddam Hussein era…. The site, about 35 miles southwest of Baghdad, was once operated by Saddam’s army and is believed to contain 2,500 degraded rockets filled with potentially deadly sarin and mustard gas.”

Not a single Democrat has apologized for the monstrous defamation campaign they conducted around this lie to cripple their president and their country in a time of war.

The Democrats began their sabotage campaign against the war in Iraq in June 2003, claiming that Bush lied when he cited a British report that Saddam was seeking fissionable uranium in Niger for his nuclear weapons program. Two official reports, one by the British and the other by the U.S. Senate confirmed that Bush’s statement was correct, but this was long after the Democrats had so demonized America’s commander-in-chief as a cynical and dangerous liar that his ability to mobilize American citizens to support the war against the Iraqi terrorists was severely damaged. No apologies from Democrats or the media, which abetted their lies, in this case either. Here is a recent testimony about the facts of Saddam’s quest for fissionable yellow cake uranium:

“As someone who led the company that transported 550 metric tons of yellowcake uranium—enough to make fourteen Hiroshima-size bombs—from Saddam’s nuclear complex in the Iraq War’s notorious ‘Triangle of Death’ for air shipment out of the country, I know Baathist Iraq’s WMD potential existed.”

Not content with these lies, the Democrats reached into their Marxist pocket for another. The progressive slogan “No Blood For Oil” was a maliciously false claim designed to undermine the moral basis for the war by accusing President Bush of serving the interests of his Texas oil cronies beginning with Vice President Cheney, former president of Halliburton, instead of the American people. In the Democrats’ telling, evil corporations in the Republicans’ pocket pushed the country into a needless and “imperialist” war that cost thousands of American and Iraqi lives. But the fact is that despite spending trillions of dollars on a war that cost thousands of American lives, America got no oil out of the war in Iraq, which has wound up in the hands of ISIS terrorists and the People’s Republic of China. No apologies for this myth either.

Perhaps the most destructive lie that Democrats have used to sabotage the war against the Islamist fanatics is that fighting terrorists creates more of them. Nancy Pelosi actually told 60 Minutes’ Steve Croft that if America left Iraq the terrorists would leave too. The argument has been used by progressives to oppose a serious military effort to stop ISIS in Syria and Iraq rather than having to fight them here at home. But aggressive pre-emptive war against the terrorists in their homelands rather than ours has the opposite effect as the victory in Iraq showed before Obama undid it.

The six-year retreat of the Obama Administration from the battlefields in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and appeasement of the terrorist state of Iran, has created more terrorists than we have ever seen. The weakness displayed by the chief defender of freedom under the leadership of an anti-American president has been a provocation to terrorists. The terror threat diminished under Bush but has grown dramatically under Obama. That is because fighting terrorists does not produce them. ISIS is able to recruit thousands of new terrorists because Islamist radicals are inspired by what Osama bin Laden called “the strong horse,” by beheadings and the slaughter of Christians without a serious reprisal. This is the face of the evil that confronts us, and we better wake up to that threat before it is too late.

What we are seeing in Jerusalem today is not simply Palestinian terrorism. It is Islamic jihad. No one likes to admit it. The television reporters insist that this is the worst possible scenario because there is no way to placate it.

There is no way to reason with it.

So what else is new? The horrible truth is that all of the anti-Jewish slaughters perpetrated by our Arab neighbors have been motivated to greater or lesser degrees by Islamic Jew-hatred. The only difference between the past hundred years and now is that today our appeasement-oriented elite is finding it harder to pretend away the obvious fact that we cannot placate our enemies.

No “provocation” by Jews drove two Jerusalem Arabs to pick up meat cleavers and a rifle and slaughter rabbis in worship like sheep and then mutilate their bodies.

No “frustration” with a “lack of progress” in the “peace process,” can motivate people to run over Jewish babies or attempt to assassinate a Jewish civil rights activist.

The reason that these terrorists have decided to kill Jews is that they take offense at the fact that in Israel, Jews are free. They take offense because all their lives they have been taught that Jews should live at their mercy, or die by their sword.

They do so because they believe, as former Jordanian MP Ya’qub Qarash said on Palestinian television last week, that Christians and Muslims should work together to forbid the presence of Jews in “Palestine” and guarantee that “not a single Jew will remain in Jerusalem.”

Our neighbors are taught that Muhammad, the founder of Islam, signed the treaty of Hudaybiyah in 628 as a ploy to buy time during which he would change the balance of power between his army and the Jews of Kuraish. And 10 years later, once his army gained the upper hand, he annihilated the Jews.

Throughout the 130-year history of modern Zionism, Islamic Jew-hatred has been restrained by two forces: the desire of many Arabs to live at peace with their Jewish neighbors; and the ability of Israeli authorities and before them, British authorities, to deter the local Arab Muslims from attacking.

The monopoly on Arab Muslim leadership has always belonged to the intolerant bigots. Support for coexistence has always been the choice of individuals.

Haj Amin el-Husseini’s first act as the founder of the Palestinian Arab identity was to translate The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and serialize them in the local press.

During the Arab jihad of 1936-1939, Husseini’s gangs of murderers killed more Arabs than the British did. He targeted those who sought peaceful coexistence with the Jews.

His successor Yasser Arafat followed his example.

During the 1988-1991 Palestinian uprising, the PLO killed more Palestinians than the IDF did. Like Husseini, Arafat targeted Palestinians who worked with Israel.

Since Israel imprudently embraced Arafat and the PLO in 1993 and permitted them to govern the Palestinians in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, and exert direct influence and coercive power over the Arabs of Jerusalem, the Palestinian Authority’s governing institutions have used all the tools at their disposal to silence those who support peaceful coexistence with Israel, and indoctrinate the general public in Islamic and racial Jew-hatred.

Much has been made of the recent spike in incitement of violence by Palestinian leaders led by Arafat’s successor Mahmoud Abbas. But the flames Abbas and his comrades are throwing would not cause such conflagrations if they hadn’t already indoctrinated their audience to desire the destruction of the Jews.

You cannot solicit murder among those who haven’t been taught that committing murder is an act of heroism.

Today Israel must take swift, effective action to stop the slaughter. The damage that has been done to the psyches of the Arabs of Jerusalem and their brethren in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, cannot be repaired in a timeline relevant to the task of preventing the next massacre.

This means that for the time being, on the tactical level, Israel’s only play is strengthening its deterrence.

Israel faces two major constraints in meeting this challenge.

First, the European Union and the Obama administration, as well as the US foreign policy elite, are obsessively committed to a policy of empowering the Palestinians against Israel.

The Spanish parliament’s decision to go ahead with its planned vote to recognize the “State of Palestine,” just hours after the massacre at the Bnei Torah Kehillat Yaakov synagogue in Jerusalem’s Har Nof neighborhood shows that the EU’s dedication to strengthening the Palestinians against Israel is entirely unrelated to events on the ground.

They don’t care who the Palestinians are or what they do. For their own reasons they have made supporting the Palestinians at Israel’s expense their top foreign policy priority.

Similarly, US President Barack Obama couldn’t contain his compulsion to pressure Israel even in his statement condemning the massacre. Even there, Obama called on Israelis and Palestinians equally to restrain themselves.

Obama’s unabated hostility toward Israel was brought to bear on Tuesday afternoon when the State Department restated its rejection of Jewish property rights in Jerusalem and its desire to see the homes of terrorist murderers left intact for the welfare of their terror-supporting families.

On Tuesday, Israel’s social media outlets were filled with angry rebukes of Western media outlets from CNN to MSNBC to CBS, to the BBC. All these networks, and many others, did everything in their power to explain away the synagogue slaughter as just another instance of a cycle of violence. That is, they all sought to frame the discussion in a way that would lead their viewers to the conclusion that the slaughter of praying rabbis was justified.

While appalling, the coverage was not the least surprising. The Western elite media’s devotion to their false narrative of Israeli culpability for all the problems in the region is absolute. Networks would rather wreck their professional reputations than tell the truth.

Together with the EU, the American policy elite and the Obama administration, the media place Israel’s leaders in a bind. Every step they take to defend the country and protect the rights of Jews meets with automatic and libelous condemnation.

The other impediment Israel faces in deterring anti-Jewish violence against its citizenry is its own weakness. Since the inception of the phony peace process, Israel has continuously rewarded the Palestinians for their murderous violence against its citizenry.

From Israel’s transfer of control over all the Palestinian population centers in Judea and Samaria, to its forcible expulsion of its own people from Gaza, to its repeated releases of terrorists from prison, to its continued transfer of hundreds of millions of shekels in tax revenues to the PA, Israel has showed the Palestinians at every turn that far from being punished for murdering Jews, they will be rewarded for doing so.

Given the US and European support for the Palestinians, Israeli declarations that there will be no future releases of terrorists have no credibility. If terrorists aren’t killed on the spot, they can assume that they will eventually be released; if not in exchange for an Israeli hostage, Israel will release them in an attempt to placate the White House.

But even with these constraints on its actions, Israel can take steps to deter its hate-filled enemies from attacking.

Since the current campaign of murder is being carried out by terrorists largely acting on their own accord, the measures Israel adopts to stop the attacks should be directed primarily against individual terrorists. As for action against the PA, it needs to be credible, consistent and directed to where it will hurt Palestinian leaders the most: their wallets.

With regard to the individual terrorists, the government has made much of its intention to destroy the homes of terrorists. While it sounds good, there is limited evidence of the effectiveness of this punitive measure, which is a relic of the British Mandate.

Rather than destroy their homes, Israel should adopt the US anti-narcotics policy of asset seizure.

All assets directly or indirectly tied to terrorists, including their homes and any other structure where they planned their crimes, and all remittances to them, should be seized and transferred to their victims, to do with what they will.

If Israel hands over the homes of the synagogue butchers to the 24 orphans of Rabbi Moshe Twersky, Rabbi Kalman Levine, Rabbi Aryeh Kupinsky and Rabbi Avraham Goldberg, not only will justice be served. The children’s inheritance of the homes of their fathers’ killers will send a clear and demoralizing message to other would-be killers.

Not only will their atrocities fail to remove the Jews from Israel. Every terrorist will contribute to the Zionist project by donating his home to the Jewish settlement enterprise.

Just as Israel has repeatedly buckled under US pressure to release terrorists from jail, so it has bowed to US pressure to continue to fund the PA by transferring the tax revenues it collects on goods imported to the PA.

Assuming that the government is too weak to stand up to the Americans, at a minimum it can see that the money is properly used.

To that end, the Knesset should pass a law permitting Israeli terror victims to sue the PA for actual and punitive damages in Israel courts. The sums awarded to the victims should be taken from the tax revenues Israel collects for the PA. The law should apply retroactively to all victims of Palestinian terror carried out since the establishment of the PA in May 1994.

Not only should the law permit Israeli terror victims to sue the PA. It should dictate actions the Justice Ministry must take to assist them in bringing suit.

Israel should also revoke citizenship and residency rights not only from terrorists themselves, but from those who enjoy citizenship and residency rights by dint of their relationship with the terrorists.

Wives who received Israeli residency or citizenship rights though marriage to terrorists should have their rights revoked, as should the children of the terrorists.

Since Tuesday’s massacre, aside from Abbas’s phony condemnation, the Palestinian leadership and public from Fatah to Hamas have been unanimous in their praise for the atrocity.

Today Israel is powerless to influence the hearts of our Arab neighbors. But we can influence their minds. We can deter them from attacking us.

The actions set forth above: asset seizure, revenue seizure and citizenship/residency abrogation for terrorists and their dependents are steps that Israel can take today, despite the hostile international climate.

If the government and Knesset adopt these measures, they will rectify some of the damage Israel has inflicted on itself by showing the Palestinians over two decades that they will be rewarded for their aggression.

If our leaders fail to take these or similar actions, and suffice with complaining about incitement, their condemnations of the murder of Jews will ring as hollow as those sounded by the BBC, Obama and Abbas.

The parallels with other tyrants and Obama have been evident now for 6 years. It's shocking and disgusting to witness the media and probably the majority of Americans clueless about this, or simply in denial and willfully looking the other way. As I've said here before - this is exactly how the Holocaust was allowed to happen in Europe. Wonder no longer - look around you at current world events.

Further - don't think for a moment Obama won't impose martial law and fire on American citizens when he feels the time is right. He is an Alinskyite through and through, and as such - the ends justify the means. He doesn't deserve the benefit to the doubt at this point - he's a proven liar and fraud.

“The one [a president] can confer no privileges whatever; the other [the king] can make denizens of aliens, noblemen of commoners; can erect corporations with all the rights incident to corporate bodies.”

– Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 69

Make no mistake about it. Obama’s illegal amnesty will not just apply to 5 million individuals. It will apply by default to all 12-20 million illegals in the country as well as the millions more who will now come here to enjoy the permanent cessation of borders and sovereignty.

Lie #1: Every President has Taken Executive Action on Immigration: No other president has ever issued an amnesty of anywhere near this scope, created it out of thin air, or built it upon a prior executive action instead of a statute. And in the case of President Eisenhower, his executive action was to deport 80,000 illegal immigrants.

Lie #2: Illegal Immigrant Crossings are Down: Actually, this is the third straight year that border crossings have gone up, not to mention the entirely new wave from Central America.

Lie #3: It does not grant citizenship or the right to stay here permanently: Under the royal edict, the work permits can be renewed every three years, and most likely, they will be renewed at the same 99.5% acceptance rate as DACA applications. And once they get Social Security cards, they are going nowhere. So yes, this is permanent. And yes, they will be able to get green cards, which puts them on an automatic path to citizenship: “we are reducing the time that families are separated while obtaining their green cards. Undocumented immigrants who are immediate relatives of lawful permanent residents or sons or daughters of US citizens can apply to get a waiver if a visa is available.”

Lie #4: Only 5 Million: Make no mistake about it. Obama’s illegal amnesty will not just apply to 5 million individuals. It will apply by default to all 12-20 million illegals in the country as well as the millions more who will now come here to enjoy the permanent cessation of borders and sovereignty. Given the numerous options for people to become eligible for amnesty, ICE and CPB will be restricted from enforcing the law against anyone because each individual has to be afforded the opportunity to present themselves and apply for status. There is no way those who were here for less than 5 years will be deported and there’s no way the new people rushing the border and overstaying their visas will be repatriated.

Lie #5: Deport Felons: Obama claims he is going to focus on deporting felons. Yet, he has done the opposite. 36,000 convicted criminal aliens were released last year, 80,000 criminal aliens encountered by ICE weren’t even placed into deportation proceedings, 167,000 criminal aliens who were ordered deported are still at large, 341,000 criminal aliens released by ICE without deportation orders are known to be free and at large in the US. Again, this is cessation of deportations for everyone. They are leaving no illegal behind.

Lie #6: Don’t deport families: Obama is playing the family card. It works like this: people are encouraged to come here illegally, Obama grants them amnesty, then their relatives all get to come, even though they would otherwise be ineligible under public charge laws. Yet, at the same time, because the bureaucracy will be flooded with applications of illegals, and those are the applications that will be prioritized, those families who came here legally will have to wait longer to be united. There is no longer an incentive to enter the legal immigration process.

Lie #7: They have to pay taxes to stay: Aside from the absurd notion that they would turn someone away for not paying taxes, almost every one of these illegal immigrants lacks a high enough income to incur a net positive tax liability. Hence, by paying taxes, he actually means they will collect refundable tax credits!

Lie #8: Background Checks: Just the thought of a criminal background check of people coming from the third world on a lawless program is a joke. But the reality is that Obama has already done this with DACA, and 99.5% of applications were approved, including those of criminals.

Lie #9: Cracking Down on Illegal Immigration at the Border: Obama promises to beef up resources at the border. But as we’ve seen over the past few years, what good are more agents if they are explicitly intimidated into turning a blind eye. Moreover, there is no promise to build a fence or implement a visa tracking system, so any talk of enforcement is an insult to our intelligence. Moreover, he is unilaterally abolishing the Secure Communities program, the only successful interior enforcement program left after he abolished 287g state-federal cooperation in 2012. At a time when we are facing threats from Islamic terror and deadly diseases, this invitation to the world will present a security nightmare.

Lie #10: Scripture tells us, we shall not oppress a stranger: It’s great to see him quoting the Bible for once, but nice try. There are different variations of this verse throughout the Bible, but each one uses the Hebrew word “Ger” to describe what Obama translates as “stranger.” A Ger is a convert to Judaism. The commandment was not referring to people who illegally migrate to a nation state. And more importantly, it is downright offensive to Americans to insinuate that not granting them benefits is tantamount to oppression, especially given the fact that they have been the biggest recipients of our generous legal system. Moreover, if there is oppression taking place it is to the American taxpayer and worker and those who suffer from gangs like MS-13.

Daniel Horowitz is Senior Editor of Conservative Review. Follow him on twitter @RMConservative.

Ignoring the brutal, historic slap-down angry American voters gave his party this month, President Obama unveiled plans for a unilaterally imposed amnesty that will shield an estimated 5 million illegal aliens from deportation.

Whether Republicans, now in possession of a thunderous mandate to fight Obama tooth and nail, will fight this despotic usurpation of the lawmaking powers of Congress remains to be seen.

Obama doesn’t care. He is pressing on, hoping to fill America with millions of new Democrat voters. And he’s going to kill American jobs in the process.

“We expect people who live in this country to play by the rules,” said the president. The address from the White House came yesterday, which just so happened to be Revolution Day (also known as Civil War Day) in Mexico.

“We expect those who cut the line will not be unfairly rewarded,” the president continued. Yet Obama went on to propose just such a reward in the form of a special “deal” for unlawful immigrants:

So we’re going to offer the following deal: If you’ve with been in America more than five years. If you have children who are American citizens or illegal residents. If you register, pass a criminal background check and you’re willing to pay your fair share of taxes, you’ll be able to apply to stay in this country temporarily without fear of deportation. You can come out of the shadows and get right with the law. That’s what this deal is.

Strangely, Obama, who routinely flouts the Constitution, still acknowledges some limits to his power. The deal, he said, does not apply to recently arrived illegal aliens or illegals who have yet to sneak into the country.

“It does not grant citizenship or the right to stay here permanently, or offer the same benefits that citizens receive,” Obama said. “Only Congress can do that. All we’re saying is we’re not going to deport you.”

Whether the benefits illegal aliens receive are as generous as benefits that citizens receive is beside the point. Illegal aliens are already eligible for extensive benefits from the government and Obama is a big believer in getting poor people addicted to welfare. No serious person believes illegals won’t have access to social programs.

In the address Obama played semantic games. What he’s doing is not an amnesty, he said:

Amnesty is the immigration system we have today. Millions of people who live here without paying their taxes or playing by the rules, while politicians use the issue to scare people and whip up votes at election time. That’s the real amnesty, leaving this broken system the way it is. Mass amnesty would be unfair.

The former part-time adjunct constitutional law lecturer has it wrong. A failure to enforce a law isn’t tantamount to amnesty. Amnesty is an official governmental act of forgiveness that excuses a violation of the law. Being in a state of legal limbo in which law enforcement hasn’t yet called your number isn’t the same as amnesty.

Nor is the immigration system broken, at least not in the way Obama means.

When progressives say the system is broken, they mean it is functioning in a less than optimal manner, failing to capture every single prospective illegal alien available to wade across the Rio Grande or walk across the nation’s largely undefended border with Mexico. To them, immigration policy is a taxpayer-subsidized get-out-the-vote scheme for Democrats and the best reform they could imagine would be to abolish America’s borders altogether. Obama’s new amnesty plan is a step in this direction.

It is also a profoundly cynical move that rewards lawbreaking and begets future immigration amnesties. It will spell electoral death for the Republican Party in coming years because Latinos, who are believed to comprise the bulk of the illegals, have traditionally shown a strong preference for the Democratic Party and its left-of-center public policies. The amnesty for 5 million illegals is likely just the beginning. The government recently issued a procurement order seeking a contractor to make as many as 34 million immigration documents over the coming five years.

During his address, Obama quoted the Book of Exodus, saying:

Scripture tells us that we shall not oppress a stranger, for we know the heart of a stranger — we were strangers once, too. My fellow Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once, too.

But the immigrants in question are not the legal immigrants of the past who followed the rules when they came to this country. They are invaders who broke the law and who continue to break the law by being here. America is not, nor has it ever been, a nation of illegal immigrants.

To qualify for relief from deportation, individuals will have to register with the government, pass criminal and national security background checks, pay their taxes, and pay a processing fee, according to a White House handout. Applications can’t be filed until early next year.

Parents of U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents as of the date of the announcement are eligible, provided that they are not “enforcement priorities” and have been present in the U.S. since Jan. 1, 2010. Also eligible are individuals who arrived in this country before Jan. 1, 2010 and before turning 16 years old, regardless of how old they are now. Processing times for certain categories of green card applicants will be accelerated. Recent arrivals who entered the country after Jan. 1 of this year will not be eligible to apply.

Obama lapdogs were ecstatic about the planned amnesty.

Echoing Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) who absurdly compared Obama’s executive order to the Emancipation Proclamation, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) asked, “Does the public know that the Emancipation Proclamation was an executive order?”

Except that the Emancipation Proclamation freed categories of slaves, innocent people victimized by an abhorrent institution, not illegal aliens who took it upon themselves to invade the country and abuse the goodwill of Americans. The only thing the two executive orders have in common is that a president signed them.

Republicans are deeply split on the amnesty issue so anyone expecting Republican lawmakers to give Obama a well-deserved rhetorical mauling two weeks after the GOP crushed Democrats in midterm elections will be disappointed in coming days. That’s not what the emasculated party of Lincoln does because it is terrified of being called racist for opposing the nation’s first (half) black president.

Despite running a virtually content-free campaign, on Nov. 4 the GOP flipped control of the 100-seat U.S. Senate, winning at least 53 seats as of this writing. The House GOP increased its majority, winning at least 244 out of 435 seats. In the new year Republicans will control at least 31 state governors’ mansions and at least 68 of the 99 state legislative chambers across the country (Nebraska’s legislature has only one chamber). In at least 23 states Republicans will control the governorship and both houses of the state legislature. Democrats can make the same claim about only 7 states.

The election was arguably, depending on the psephological metrics used, the worst showing for the Democratic Party in its history.

Despite the newly enfeebled status of the Democrats, the House GOP’s response was predictably weak. Instead of righteously inveighing against the grave threat that Obama’s actions pose to the republic, on Twitter the official House Republican feed meekly exhorted the president to cooperate with them.

“We need a real fix, not a quick fix. Let’s fix our broken immigration system together,” read one GOP tweet. Another said, “Mr. President, stop acting alone. Let’s work together.” Maybe the GOP’s communications professionals would like to roast some s’mores and sing Kumbaya with the president.

And Obama must be quaking in his jackboots. Even after six years of getting beaten to a pulp, constantly sucker-punched by the nation’s Alinskyite president, congressional Republicans still aren’t anywhere close to grasping what he really is. They continue to treat Obama as if he’s a legitimate, sincere president who actually wants to do what’s best for America. They foolishly believe Obama cares about his falling public approval numbers and his presidential legacy. They refuse to acknowledge that he is a radical revolutionary figure hellbent on destroying, or in his own words, fundamentally transforming, the U.S. They actually seem to think Obama is interested in negotiating with them to find policy solutions that benefit the country. Many elected GOPers appear not to have an inkling that embracing amnesty is the same as signing a death warrant for the Republican Party.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), who supports amnesty in principle but is under intense pressure from conservative lawmakers, is trying to put down a rebellion in his own House GOP conference. Although Obama has previously protested that he is not a king or an emperor, “he’s sure acting like one,” Boehner, who may face a challenge to his speakership in January, said yesterday.

“If President Obama acts in defiance of the people and imposes his will on the country, Congress will act,” he said.

Retiring Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) told USA Today earlier this week that Obama’s amnesty could spark civil unrest. “The country’s going to go nuts, because they’re going to see it as a move outside the authority of the president, and it’s going to be a very serious situation.”

“You’re going to see — hopefully not — but you could see instances of anarchy … You could see violence,” Coburn said. Obama will be behaving like “an autocratic leader that’s going to disregard what the Constitution says and make law anyway.”

“Instead of having the rule of law handling in our country today, now we’re starting to have the rule of rulers, and that’s the total antithesis of what this country was founded on,” he said. “Here’s how people think: Well, if the law doesn’t apply to the president … then why should it apply to me?”

House Appropriations Committee chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) appears to have taken the wrong lesson from the electoral bloodbath this month that set Democrats back 150 years. Although voters delivered the message that they want Obama stopped, Rogers interprets the election as a mandate for surrender.

“I believe a major consequence of this election is a loud and clear mandate from the American people for Washington to stop the gridlock, work together across ideological lines and start producing real accomplishments on their behalf,” Rogers wrote in an op-ed.

Rogers wants Congress to pass a long-term funding bill called an omnibus appropriations bill before the government’s authority to spend money expires on Dec. 11. It would keep the government operating for the rest of the federal fiscal year which runs to Sept. 30, 2015.

There will be “an extraordinary amount of work to do when the new Congress convenes in January … but there simply won’t be the political bandwidth available to address these pressing issues if Congress is bogged down in old battles and protracted to-do lists.”

Some Republicans have proposed defunding the parts of the government that would process amnesty-related paperwork.

Separately, Rogers has made the absurd suggestion that Congress approve a big, all-encompassing spending bill now and then rescind amnesty-relating funding next year. Rescissions happen but they’re relatively rare. Why bother giving Obama a green light to proceed with the amnesty now in the hope of slamming on the brakes in the new year?

The real problem with enacting an omnibus spending bill, according to Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, is that such a funding measure “would enable Obama to complete his lawless amnesty scheme.”

Rogers insists that the amnesty cannot be stopped through the appropriations process.

It would be “impossible to defund President Obama’s executive order through a government spending bill,” House Appropriations Committee spokeswoman Jennifer Hing said yesterday, explaining that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is funded by user fees.

It is a facile, easily disproved argument. USCIS, an agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), is part of the federal government. It was created by Congress and Congress can do anything it wants to it. It can give it money, take money away from it, give it a spanking, or order it to stand on one leg and bark like a dog.

In a development overshadowed by the unveiling of the amnesty, DHS announced yesterday that it will grant “temporary protected status” to up to 8,000 people from the Ebola-afflicted African countries of Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone. These visitors may apply for work permits for 18 months. Unlike ordinary recipients of temporary protected status, these Ebola refugees will not be allowed to travel to their home countries and then return to the U.S., in order to prevent the spread of Ebola.

Or so the story goes. If Obama can find a way to let them stay in the U.S., he’ll do it.

If the Republican leadership does not defend our republic against this lawless tyrant, we are finished. Sitting out elections is not going to achieve anything. This may very well devolve into a civil war, with the country splintering into conservative and progressive countries. However it plays out - it will not be pretty. It shocks me that so many people STILL refuse to see Obama for the despot he so clearly is. He has ZERO regard for the rule of law, and believe me - he has every intention of making himself dictator if he has the chance - just as his late buddy Hugo Chavez did. Mark my words.

The nation awaits the verdict in Ferguson and prepares for the vindictive retribution of the lynch mob that has been tearing the city up for months, and thirsting for the blood of officer Darren Wilson not because he is guilty but because he is white. The chief encourager of the lynch mob is now the president of the United States, preceded by his former attorney general and his chief adviser on race relations who is also the nation’s leading racist, Al Sharpton. That is the disturbing reality we face as a nation, and have been facing now for decades ever since the civil rights movement was itself transformed into a lynch mob under the leadership of Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. That is the stark truth around which there is a national silence because the racists and their mobs are largely black.

When a Neighborhood Watch guard shot Trayvon Martin in February 2012, a chorus of civil rights activists concluded that he had been killed because of his race. Michael Skolnick, the political director for hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons, spoke for the consensus in an article he titled, “White People You Will Never Look Suspicious.”

I will never look suspicious to you. Even if I have a black hoodie, a pair of jeans and white sneakers on ... I will never watch a taxicab pass me by to pick someone else up. I will never witness someone clutch their purse tightly against their body as they walk by me. I won’t have to worry about a police car following me for two miles, so they can ‘run my plates. I will never have to pay before I eat. And I certainly will never get ‘stopped and frisked.’ I will never look suspicious to you, because of one thing and one thing only. The color of my skin. I am white….[1]

Skolnick spoke for those who rushed to condemn the Watch Guard, George Zimmerman, calling him a racist and killer in advance of the evidence, and demanding his arrest. It was the pervasive theme of the outrage even though Zimmerman was of Peruvian descent and not “white.” To make the racial case, Zimmerman’s accusers labeled him a “white Hispanic,” and disregarded the fact that he was Latino with a great-grandfather who was black. Speaking for the many, Congressional Black Caucus member Hank Johnson claimed that Martin was “executed for WWB in a GC—Walking While Black in a Gated Community.”[2] It was the unmistakable implication of President Obama’s own statement on the case: “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.”[3] For the already convinced, Trayvon Martin was killed not because of anything he had done, but because he was a black man in a racist culture, and therefore racial prey.

As it happens, the term “white skin privilege” was first popularized in the 1970s by the SDS radicals of “Weatherman,” who were carrying on a terrorist war against “Amerikkka,” a spelling designed to stigmatize the United States as a nation of Klansmen.[4] Led by presidential friends, Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn, the Weather terrorists called on other whites to renounce their privilege and join a global race war already in progress.

Although their methods and style kept the Weather radicals on the political fringe, their views on race reflected those held by the broad ranks of the political left. In the following years, the concept of “white Skin privilege” continued to spread until it became an article of faith among all progressives, a concept that acc-ounted for everything that was racially wrong in America beginning with its constitutional founding. As Pax Christi USA, a Catholic organization, explained: “Law in the U.S. protects white skin privilege because white male landowners created the laws to protect their rights, their culture and their wealth.”[5] This was the theme of A People’s History of the United States, the most popular book ever written on the subject, now part of university curricula across the nation.

Eventually, the concept of white skin privilege was embraced even by liberals who had initially resisted it as slander against a nation that had just concluded a historically unprecedented civil rights revolution. This was because the concept of white skin privilege provided an explanation for the fact that the recent Civil Rights Acts had not led to an equality of results, and that racial disparities persisted even as overt racists and institutional barriers were vanishing from public life.

The inconvenient triumph of American tolerance presented an existential problem for civil rights activists, whom it threatened to put out of work. “White skin privilege” offered a solution. As the Southern Poverty Law Center explained: “white skin privilege is not something that white people necessarily do, create or enjoy on purpose,” but is rather an unavoidable consequence of the “transparent preference for whiteness that saturates our society.”[6] In other words, even if white Americans were no longer racists, they were.

A parallel concept favored by progressives was “institutional racism.” This was the idea that even in the absence of actual racists, the values and standards of American institutions by their very nature discriminated against non-whites. These two sophistries made possible new battles and continued the life of campaigns that annually lured millions of dollars into the deep pockets of “anti-racist” organizations and movements, even as racists were no longer detectable in the institutions themselves.

Lynching Whites

What reality is there to the claim that white skin is privileged and black is not? Is it really the case that non-whites are the exclusive targets of racial vendettas, while whites enjoy protection from racial prejudice and collective suspicion? No sober individual could possibly think so.

In fact, for decades, at the hands of progressives white males have been the prime villains in the nation’s classrooms, and the principal targets of disapprobation and presumptive guilt in the general political culture as well. Not that long ago, the nation witnessed a public scandal as racially charged as the Trayvon Martin case in the public lynching of three white male students at Duke University. Like other institutions of higher learning, Duke prides itself on its racial tolerance. There are no more sacred principles on campuses generally than racial tolerance, diversity and inclusion. As everyone knows, however, but few will take the risk to observe, these principles extend to every race but whites.

When an anonymous individual drew a noose on the office door of an African American faculty member at Columbia University the entire university community concluded that it was an act of racism, and the institution was virtually shut down to express collective horror that such an event might occur. This all took place before there was any indication that its message was racial or that its perpetrator was not the faculty member herself – which has been a not infrequent occurrence on campuses before.

When three white members of the Duke lacrosse team were accused of rape by a black prostitute, on no evidence whatsoever, the campus not only did not defend the presumption of their innocence, but rushed with intemperate haste to punish them as though they had already been tried and convicted. The university expelled them, the lacrosse coach was fired, the lacrosse season terminated, their names were published and 88 members of the Duke faculty signed an open letter condemning their racist deed.[7]

The cloud of suspicion and presumption of guilt that engulfed the students ruined their reputations and put their lives and careers on halt. It lasted for more than a year with no challenge from university officials or public authorities or the mainstream media. Yet it was entirely based on the false and malicious accusations of a local prostitute and drug addict, whose record of criminal behavior and absence of credibility were eagerly overlooked because she was black. While the faces of the innocent accused were plastered across the national media where they were portrayed as racists and rapists, the accuser herself was protected, and her name withheld throughout the case—even after her criminal libels were exposed.

The nameless accuser was a professional stripper who had been hired to entertain a fraternity party. A fellow stripper, who was also black and present at the event, denied the rape had ever taken place. One of the accused rapists proved that he was not even present when the attack was alleged to have taken place. Yet he was judged guilty all the same by the civil rights crusaders. Guilty because he was white. White skin was enough evidence to get all three students indicted by the local district attorney who was seeking votes in an election year among a constituency that was largely black and now racially inflamed (although the national press averted its eyes from this aspect of the case as well).

Leading the calls for punishment before trial were racial agitators Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Jackson was first out, attempting to secure a conviction by decrying the long “history of white men and black women and rape and assault,”[8] as though the criminal actions of a minority implicated every person of the same gender and color. Jackson also proposed to have his organization pay all tuition costs for the faceless criminal accuser should she want to attend college.[9] The clear implication was that unlike her rapists whose parents (being white) could afford a Duke education, the benighted woman was denied such an opportunity by a racist society. Not to be out mau-maued, Sharpton claimed, “this case parallels Abner Louima, who was raped and sodomized in a bathroom [by a New York City police officer] like this girl has alleged she was.”[10] The fantasizer of this ludicrous connection was a man practiced in the art of racial libels, including the infamous (and almost identical) accusations made by his infamous client Tawana Brawley who ruined the lives of six innocent white males by making false accusations of rape against them. After six years of inflicting hell on his victims, Sharpton eventually lost a libel suit brought by one of his victims. But even being a convicted liar failed to disqualify Sharpton as a civil rights “leader” since his victims were only white.

A professor of English named Houston Baker emerged as Duke’s homegrown racial arsonist, leading a posse of Duke faculty members in a public condemnation of the accused students in an ad that appeared in the Duke Chronicle. Baker charged that “white male privilege” had permitted the alleged perpetrators of “this horrific, racist incident” to remain “safe under the cover of silent whiteness.”[11] Whiteness had given them “license to rape, maraud, deploy hate speech and feel proud of themselves in the bargain.”[12]

A year later, the three lacrosse players were exonerated, and the district attorney was sacked as conclusive evidence showed that there had been no rape and they were innocent of any crime. But the mob leaders Jackson, Sharpton and Baker, never had to face consequences for their maliciously, racially motivated deeds, never were made to apologize for their racism, or concede that that’s what it was. Call that immunity black skin privilege.

The Duke travesty has left the front pages and faded in memory, along with the many other episodes of racial injustice to whites, that were never openly acknowledged as such. Not only have we have reached a national moment when innocent whites are presumed guilty on the basis of their skin color, but blacks are often presumed innocent when the evidence points to their guilt. This is true whether the crime they commit is false witness, as at Duke, or a double homicide, as in O.J. Simpson’s murder of his wife and a stranger. Simpson was defended by a “dream team” of the nation’s best lawyers and the televised trial was closely watched by the entire nation. When a mostly black jury acquitted the murderer, the overwhelming majority of Americans who had watched the trial viewed the verdict with horror. But not black America, which cheered and celebrated this miscarriage of justice as a racial “payback.” No one called that racism. That’s another black skin privilege.

In America today, blacks generally can conduct racist assaults on whites and count on “civil rights” activists and the media not to notice. In the two months following Trayvon Martin’s death, black assailants carried out at least 14 fourteen known attacks against white victims with the idea of “avenging” the fallen youth.[13] In East Toledo, six juveniles beat a 78-year-old white man, shouting: “This is for Trayvon ... Trayvon lives, white [man]. Kill that white [man]!”[14] In Gainesville, five blacks shouting “Trayvon!” beat a 27-year-old white man, leaving his face permanently disfigured. In another Gainesville incident, a black crowd shouting “Trayvon!” assaulted and stomped on a white man who was trying to recover his female companion’s purse from the hands of a black thief.[15] In Chicago, two black teenagers beat and robbed a 19-year-old white man because, as one of the attackers explained, they were angry about Trayvon Martin.[16] In Baltimore, a group of blacks beat and robbed a white man, stripping him naked, then posted a video of the assault online with the caption: “me an my boys helped get justice fore trayvon.”[17] In Mobile, a white man named Matthew Owens was brutalized by twenty African Americans armed with brass knuckles, bricks, chairs, bats and steel pipes after he asked them to stop playing basketball in the street directly in front of his home.[18] As the assailants left the scene, one of them looked back at the victim, who was bleeding profusely, and shouted,: “Now that’s justice for Trayvon!”[19] It is unlikely that many Americans have heard of these racial attacks, because the perpetrators are protected by a media that does not want to notice that the racists are black, and their victims are white.

Within weeks of the Trayvon Martin shooting, a parallel killing occurred with the skin colors reversed at a Taco Bell restaurant in Phoenix, Arizona. A 22-year-old black motorist got into an altercation with Daniel Adkins, a 29-year-old, mentally disabled “white Hispanic” who was walking by. When the argument grew heated, the motorist drew a gun and killed Adkins. When police arrived at the scene, the black shooter claimed that Adkins had swung a bat or metal pipe at him, although no such items were found at the scene. Arizona, like Florida, has a “Stand Your Ground” law that allows a person to use deadly force to protect himself when faced with a life-or-death confrontation.[20] A protective media withheld the shooter’s name, and there was no racial mob calling for his head. Unlike George Zimmerman, the gunman was not arrested nor charged with a crime. Call that black skin privilege.

If you’re black and possibly guilty but a white person is involved, the media will actively volunteer to be your advocate. This was true in the Duke case, where the New York Times and other papers convicted the accused in advance of any legal proceeding. In the Trayvon Martin case, the media withheld details of the crime that were damaging to Trayvon in order to protect him and indict Zimmerman — that the mainly white community he had entered at night had been the target of a rash of recent break-ins and burglaries by young African-American men;[21] that the hoodie Trayvon wore was a uniform for burglars; and that Trayvon had been suspended from school after burglary tools were discovered on his person along with unaccounted-for jewelry.[22] At the same time, the press flooded the airwaves and front pages with sentimental photos of Trayvon as an innocent adolescent, while withholding others of the six-foot-two, 17-year-old who beat the smaller Zimmerman to the ground, smashing his head on the concrete and causing him to scream repeatedly for his life before he fired his gun in self-defense.

Looking at the Martin case, black skin privilege means you can form a lynch mob if the target is a “white” man and the press will overlook it; you can demand a judgment in advance of the facts, and can conclude his guilt in advance of a trial. You can even take “justice” into your own hands by threatening his life as the Black Panthers did, or twittering his home address like vigilante filmmaker Spike Lee and comedienne Roseanne Barr did in the hope that someone might go after him.[23] If this isn’t a rebirth of the cracker mentality of the segregated South, it is hard to know what would be.

But it is events under the national radar that take the biggest toll. Black skin privilege means the national media will fail to report an epidemic of black race riots that have targeted whites for beatings, shootings, stabbings and rapes in major American cities recently. A determined reporter, Colin Flaherty, broke ranks to document these rampages in a book titled, White Girl Bleed A Lot, after a statement made by one of the rioters.[24] As reported in Flaherty’s book, there have been hundreds of black race riots in more than fifty American cities in the last few years,[25] including more than a dozen each in Chicago, Miami, Philadelphia, New York, Las Vegas, Milwaukee, Kansas City and Denver. In July 2011, to cite an illustrative example, a mob of African Americans created what the local NBC affiliate called an “astonishing” amount of violence at downtown Philadelphia restaurants, hotels and bars.[26] Afterwards, the politically correct police chief said he feared for the safety of the rioters.[27] But after surveying the mayhem, the city’s black mayor made an unprecedented public statement. “You have damaged your own race,” he said to the culprits, and in a pointed reference to the Martin case, he added, “Take those God darn hoodies down.”[28]

Crime Statistics

In the liberal culture, black skin privilege has created an optical illusion, persuading progressives that white-on-black attacks are commonplace events, rather than the other way around. In fact, there are five times as many black attacks on whites as the reverse. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which relies on crime victims to identify their assailants, 320,082 whites were victims of black violence in 2010, the latest year for which statistics are available, while 62,593 blacks were victims of white violence.[29] But these raw statistics understate the pattern. In 2010, the white and black populations in the United States were 197 million and 38 million, respectively.[30] In other words, blacks committed acts of interracial violence at a rate 25 times higher than whites (849 per 100,000 versus 32 per 100,000).[31]

This pattern has been among the most consistent findings of criminal-justice research for many years and for a wide variety of crimes. Nationwide there were an estimated 67,755 black-on-white aggravated assaults in 2010, as compared to with just 1,748 white-on-black crimes of the same description. In other words, blacks committed acts of interracial aggravated assault at a rate 200 times higher than whites (181 per 100,000 population versus 0.9 per 100,000).[32]

The physical threat to African Americans from whites is actually minimal compared to the epidemic of black violence against whites. The National Crime Victimization Survey reported approximately 13,000 black-on-white rapes in the United States in 2010, and 39,000 black-on-white robberies, both violent crimes against persons. By contrast, the numbers of white-on-black rapes and robberies reported in the same surveys were so infinitesimal that whites were estimated to have accounted for 0% of all rapes and robberies committed against black victims in the United States.[33]

To stoke the fires of racial grievance in the face of these contrary facts, civil rights advocates pretend that the statistics lie or that merely mentioning them is an act of racism. They tell us that black criminals aren’t actually criminals; the true culprit is the white “unjust justice system” that “profiles” blacks and creates this racist illusion. “Unjust justice system” is the term favored by Los Angeles congresswoman Maxine Waters, who explains, “the color of your skin dictates whether you will be arrested or not, prosecuted harshly or less harshly, receive a stiff sentence or gain probation or entry into treatment.”[34] Bill Quigley, legal director of the left-wing Center for Constitutional Rights, agrees with her conclusion: “The U.S. criminal-justice system is ... a race-based institution where African-Americans are directly targeted and punished in a much more aggressive way than white people.”[35]

President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also agree. At a debate during the Democratic Party primaries in 2008, Obama ignored the facts and charged that blacks and whites “are arrested at very different rates, are convicted at very different rates, [and] receive very different sentences” for “the same crime.”[36] Not to be outdone, Clinton denounced the “disgrace of a criminal-justice system that incarcerates so many more African Americans proportionately than whites.”[37] No member of the press disturbed their duet by pointing out that African Americans commit many more crimes proportionally than whites. This is black skin privilege at work, and illustrates how prevalent anti-white racist attitudes have become in the political culture.

Through sheer repetition and lack of corrective information, the myths of white skin privilege have made a deep imprint on the culture generally and the culture of black Americans in particular. According to a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll, 84% of black Americans feel that the justice system treats them unfairly.[38] But while it is true that blacks are arrested in numbers greater than their representation in the population, it is it is also true that they commit crimes in far greater numbers than their representation would warrant. African Americans are 12.6% of the U.S. population,[39] but they account for 38.9% of all violent crime arrests—including 32.5% of all rapes, 55.5% of all robberies, and 33.9% of all aggravated assaults.[40] Is this because they are arrested for crimes they didn’t commit? Are they only “guilty of being black”? In fact, the statistics are compiled by interviewing the victims of these violent crimes, which in the case of crimes committed by blacks are mostly black themselves. In 2010, black perpetrators were responsible for 80% of all violence against blacks (including 94% of homicides), while white perpetrators accounted for just 9% of all violence against blacks.[41]

Another inconvenient fact for the promoters of the racial “injustice system” myth is that numerous high-crime cities with majority-black populations and high black arrest rates are run by African American mayors and African American police chiefs. Among them are Detroit, Jackson, Birmingham, Memphis, Flint, Savannah, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C. Cognizant of the methods that police use to fight crime and the disproportionate contribution of blacks to crime rates, the former black police chief of Los Angeles, Bernard Parks said: “It’s not the fault of the police when they stop minority males or put them in jail. It’s the fault of the minority males for committing the crime. In my mind, it is not a great revelation that if officers are looking for criminal activity, they’re going to look at the kind of people who are listed on crime reports.”[42] But this sensible attitude has not penetrated the leadership of the Democratic Party nor the nation’s morally degraded civil rights movement.

Affirming Racism

Crime is only one of the areas where black skin privilege fogs the nation’s brain on racial matters. Under the banner of “leveling the playing field,” the rules of the game have been systematically rigged—against whites and in favor of blacks. Speaking for the dominant culture in our universities, and for the U.S. Supreme Court’s majority, Columbia University law professor Patricia Williams, who is black, explains: “If the modern white man, innocently or not, is the inheritor of another’s due, then it must be returned.”[43] (Innocent or not!) Attorney General Eric Holder is of a similar mind. In February 2012, he expressed amazement over the fact that anyone could seriously think that racial preferences might be bad social policy: “The question is not when does [affirmative action] end, but when does it begin ... When do people of color truly get the benefits to which they are entitled?”[44] Or, as the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall put it more candidly to his fellow justice William O. Douglas: “You guys have been practicing discrimination for years. Now it’s our turn.”[45] The current Supreme Court majority is sympathetic to this view.

This collectivist view of guilt and debts that erases individuals and their accountability is now entrenched in America’s institutional framework. In the 1970s, affirmative action was successfully redefined to mean racial preferences for non-whites, and a new standard was set for admissions policies at universities across the United States. Though black students’ median SAT scores in any given year were at least 200 points lower than the median for white students,’ blacks were admitted to virtually all academically competitive schools at much higher rates.[46] The pattern of racial privilege for blacks persists to this day, not only in undergraduate colleges and universities, but also in professional training schools for aspiring doctors and lawyers. At the University of Michigan Medical School, for instance, the odds favoring the admission of black over white applicants with the same background and academic credentials have ranged between 21-to-1 and 38-to-1.[47] At the University of Nebraska College of Law in recent years, the black-over-white admission ratio was 442-to-1;[48] and at Arizona State University Law School, 1,115-to-1.[49]

Inevitably, the racial bias does not stop with the admissions process. Once a university accepts black students, under-qualified for that school though they may be, it is imperative that they remain in school and eventually graduate, poor performance notwithstanding. This is because high minority dropout rates jeopardize not only a university’s reputation among advocates of racial preferences but also its formal accreditation. To reduce minority attrition and “level the playing field,” many professors evaluate the work of black students using a lower standard than they use for their white and Asian peers, a practice which the late sociologist David Riesman labeled “affirmative grading.”[50] A blunter characterization was made by a professor at one of California’s state universities, who observed: “We are just lying to these black students when we give them degrees.”[51] By lowering the standards for black students—without admitting that they are doing so—universities are also lying to their graduates’ future patients and clients, many of whom are likely to include large numbers of blacks themselves.

Because maintaining racially “diverse” student bodies is now a legal obligation, some schools have taken to providing monetary incentives to black students who meet normal standards, a privilege not offered to their white and Asian peers. At Penn State, beginning in the early 1990s, blacks were paid $580 if they were able to maintain a C average, while those with a B average or better were given twice that amount.[52] In 2011, Yale University announced that it would provide free tuition to black public high school graduates with a GPA of at least 3.0 and a good attendance record.[53] No white student with a 3.0 GPA need even apply to Yale. Monetary incentives have been implemented with younger students as well. In 2008, Harvard professor Roland Fryer spearheaded an initiative to pay underachieving black fourth-graders in New York up to $250 for improving their grades, and as much as $500 for seventh-graders.[54] The ugly racial condescension that goes with these reward systems (not to mention the incentives such advantages provide to students to be content with underperforming) attracts little or no notice. There are also thousands of college scholarships and fellowships earmarked exclusively for nonwhite students.[55] These are made available by private organizations, individual schools, publicly and privately held corporations, the federal government, and state governments.

These scholarships, grants and rewards are not made to students who first demonstrate that they are actually disadvantaged by race or any other factor. Many of the recipients come from quite privileged backgrounds. The benefits are granted to these students because of their race. No one would think of providing such scholarships to white students while excluding others. That would be racist. No one pays much attention to the gross injustices done to white students from all economic backgrounds, who are denied places because they “inherited” unspecified and undocumented advantages by virtue of their skin color.

Nor are racial privileges for blacks limited to educational institutions. Since the 1970s, most major corporations (and a host of smaller ones) have implemented wide-ranging race-specific strategies for recruiting minorities, sponsored scholarships for minority recipients, funded internship programs earmarked exclusively for nonwhite high school and college students, paid current and former employees a “reward” merely for identifying the names of potential “diversity candidates,” and given financial bonuses to managers for successfully recruiting and/or promoting a significant number of black employees.[56] In an effort to maintain their diversity profiles and to keep their coveted black workers from seeking greener career pastures, many companies have established minority employee organizations that sponsor mentorship and self-help programs, produce newsletters, organize fundraising activities, and provide forums in which nonwhites in the labor force can air their grievances.[57] And of course, all of these measures also serve to separate their workers on the basis of race.

Needless to say, since government is the real source of these segregated arrangements, racial privileges are ubiquitous in government hiring practices. Police and fire departments nationwide go to great lengths to recruit black applicants. Where those applicants have failed the qualifying examinations in disproportionately high numbers, departments have simply thrown out the results, lowered the standards, or created new definitions of what constitutes a passing grade. One of the most blatant manifestations of the obsession with diversity involved the Boston Fire Department. A pair of white identical twins, Philip and Paul Malone, both failed the department’s qualification test and consequently were dropped from the applicant pool. Two years later they took the test again, at a time when the department was under pressure from a court-ordered affirmative action plan to hire more minorities. In an attempt to exploit the judicial mandate, the Malones re-classified themselves as black, claiming to have recently discovered that their long-deceased great-grandmother was of African ancestry. Their exam scores this time around were 57% and 69%, respectively—far below the 82% cutoff point for white applicants, but more than sufficient for black applicants. The Boston Fire Department hired the “black” Malone twins.[58]

Black Racism

Like the racial injustice against blacks that preceded it, the racial injustice enforced on behalf of blacks has damaged them as well as whites. It has empowered incompetence and sown resentment, and ensured that racial tensions persist nearly half a century after the Civil Rights Acts outlawed racial barriers. A 2009 Quinnipiac University poll asked respondents, “Do you think affirmative action programs that give preferences to blacks and other minorities in hiring, promotions and college admissions should be continued or … abolished?” Discriminated-against whites favored “abolished” by a margin of 64% to 27%, while the black beneficiaries, not surprisingly, favored “continued” by 78% to 14%.[59]

Racial bias is now such an integral part of America’s political culture that in 2008 black skin privilege elected a president of the United States. Absent this privilege, is the career of our 44th president conceivable? What political novice, lacking notable legislative or professional achievements, having spent his entire career on the radical fringes of American politics, and having encumbered himself with an unrepentant terrorist and a racial bigot as his close political collaborators, could even think about winning a major party presidential nomination, let alone being elected? Absent black skin privilege, what candidate with such a checkered past could go virtually un-vetted by the national press, or receive a pass from his political opponent on matters that would sink the fortunes of a candidate of any other race?

Black skin privilege guarantees not only exemptions from intellectual and political standards that others are required to meet, but from moral standards as well. What white celebrity, having shot his brother as a juvenile, dealt cocaine as an adult, and stabbed a rival business executive with a five-inch blade could count an American president among his friends and be invited to host his political fund-raisers? But rapper Jay‑Z did exactly that during Obama’s 2012 re-election run, and both he and the president could remain confident that no one would suggest it was a problem.[60]

Black skin privilege is a license not only to commit no-fault crimes, but to be openly racist without adverse consequences. White celebrity bigots, like Mel Gibson, are routinely condemned and shunned as pariahs, as they should be. It would be hard to imagine a white counterpart boasting that he had voted on the basis of skin color, characterizing non-whites as racists, and repeatedly using the word “nigger” to salt his wisdom. When this outrage was committed by black actor Samuel L. Jackson, however, nobody gave his racism a second thought. In February 2012, Jackson told Ebony magazine, “I voted for Barack because he was black. ’Cuz that’s why other folks vote for other people—because they look like them…. That’s American politics, pure and simple. [Obama’s] message didn’t mean [bleep] to me. When it comes down to it, [whites] wouldn’t have elected a nigger. Because, what’s a nigger? A nigger is scary. Obama ain’t scary at all.... I hope Obama gets scary in the next four years, ’cuz he ain’t gotta worry about getting re-elected.”[61] This ignorant and repellent outburst (whites do vote for blacks) resulted in no consequences for Jackson; he didn’t even lose his job as spokesman for Apple’s popular iPhone.[62]

Racist behavior isn’t even a disqualifier for civil rights leaders if they are black. Leader of a “civil rights movement” is how the media characterized Louis Farrakhan during his Million Man March, and Wikipedia still does today. What white racist could hold a march to protest black supremacy and air the grievances of white males, and expect to receive respectable press coverage let alone attract nearly a million whites to follow him? But Louis Farrakhan did just that with blacks.[63] A white racist of Farrakhan’s ilk couldn’t get 5,000 sympathizers to march on Washington, let alone 500,000. That’s a black skin privilege. What white spiritual leader could support the torture-murders of South African blacks, compare Israel to Nazi Germany, and still be regarded as a moral icon? A black cleric like Bishop Desmond Tutu can.[64] What racial arsonist and convicted liar, whose incitements led directly to the incineration of seven individuals, could be regarded by the national media as a civil rights spokesman, and then hired as a TV anchor by NBC?[65] Only a black demagogue like Al Sharpton. Only a black racist like Sharpton could find himself lauded by an American president (as it happens, Barack Obama) as “a voice for the voiceless and ... dispossessed.”[66]

Nor have bigoted advocacies and anti-Semitic slurs cut short the career of America’s other celebrated race hustler. On the contrary, Jesse Jackson’s inflammatory rhetoric and racially motivated campaigns have endeared him to Democratic presidents and made him a millionaire many times over. Despite his success as a black man in America, he lectures Americans on how white racism is “the rot of our national character.”[67] That defamatory charge is the source of his impressive income. By threatening major corporations with racial boycotts that he alone can prevent, Jackson has been able to extort lucrative ransoms not only for the organizations he runs but for himself and his immediate family. In one celebrated case, he called off his threatened boycott of Anheuser-Busch after the company agreed to sell his sons one of its beer distributorships at a specially reduced price, making them millionaires in the bargain. [68]

Despite the baggage he carries, Jackson has been able to make two high-profile runs for the presidency and remain a national civil rights figure. During his first presidential outing, he referred to Jews as “Hymies” and New York as “Hymietown,”[69] indiscretions that would have ruined other politicians but only caused a hiccup in his campaign. He received 3.5 million votes during the primaries—enough to earn him a keynote speech at the 1984 Democratic convention.[70] His anti-Semitism resurfaced in October 2008, when he predicted that an Obama presidency would provide a welcome counterbalance to the “Zionists who have controlled American policy for decades.” [71]

Black skin privilege has enabled Jackson to enjoy a career that would be denied to any non-black politician, while accumulating high-level honors along the way. He has been awarded more than forty honorary doctorates by American universities.[72] He was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Clinton, the highest award a civilian can receive,[73] while the U.S. Post Office put his likeness on a pictorial postal cancellation, making him only the second living person to receive such recognition.[74] He has used this undeserved respect, in conjunction with other black demagogues, to transform a civil rights movement that once stood for race-neutrality in the law, into a vigilante posse seeking one law for “people of color” and another for the rest of America.

Destroying the Diverse Union

Those who attempt to rationalize racial bigotry when it is bigotry on behalf of blacks usually claim that this injustice is designed to redress a historic one, correcting the results of previous discrimination. There is certainly a truth here. Even as black skin privilege has meant widespread injustice to others, it has also brought benefits to a historically discriminated-against group, although individual blacks today would be hard put to claim that racism has been an impediment to their own achievements and successes. Many beneficiaries of racial preferences may also have put the unfair advantages they received through racial preferences to good use. But perpetuating unfairness and inflicting injustice on others because of their skin color is a dangerous proposition, whatever the benefits that may accrue to some.

Racial privilege does more than merely damage the unlucky individuals who are its victims. When enforced by government and backed by law, it tears at the very fabric of the social order, regardless of whom it benefits. The wounds that the principle of separate-and-unequal inflicts on the community are incomparably greater than the damages incurred by individuals or the benefits that accrue to them. Building racial bias into the framework of the nation compromises the neutrality of the law that governs us all. It corrupts the standards that make a diverse community possible, and creates a racial spoils system that is the antithesis of the American dream, which was Martin Luther King’s dream as well. By corrupting the principle of neutrality, racial privilege breaks the common bond between America’s diverse communities and undermines the trust that makes the nation whole.

“All men are created equal” is the creed that makes a diverse nation possible. But a flaw was built into the original construction, which is open to multiple interpretations, including destructive ones. The most destructive of these is the idea that government can and should “level the playing field.” It is this idea that has given birth to the new racism. Obviously, all people are not created equal but are born with disparate abilities and characteristics. People are clearly unequal in beauty, intelligence, character, upbringing, and other vital aspects of personhood that lead directly to inequalities of celebrity, power, wealth and social standing. Because these inequalities are rooted in human nature, there can never be a level playing field. Moreover, the efforts to produce one must lead (and historically have led) to the loss of individual freedom. This is because the field can only be made equal—and then only superficially—by governmental force as an all-powerful state takes the earned fruits of one person’s labor, intelligence and talent and distributes it to those it prefers, and does so in the name of “social justice.”

The American Founders understood that there is an irreconcilable conflict between freedom and equality, between individual liberty and equal results. They understood that “social justice” in practice is just a rationale for the taking of one person’s achievements, and giving them to others who are favored by the party in power. What is justice to some is necessarily theft to others. It is an “injustice justice system.” In order to block such levelers, the founders created a Constitution that guaranteed property rights and instituted a system of checks and balances to frustrate their designs. The purpose of these constitutional checks, as their chief author James Madison wrote, was to thwart the “rage … for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project.”[75] History has proven the wisdom of the Founders’ concern.

In a free society composed of unequal individuals, the drive to level the playing field is a totalitarian desire and a threat to freedom because it empowers government to confiscate the talents and earnings of some for the benefits of those it favors. The expansion of governmental power into every individual sphere whatever its justification entails a loss of freedom for all. Since the targets of the levelers are the creators of society’s wealth, an inevitable result of social justice is generalized poverty and economic decline.

In a free society, composed of individuals who are unequal by nature, the highest government good is neutrality in the treatment of its citizens before the law. One standard and one justice for all. This is the only equality that is not at odds with individual freedom. It is the only equality that can make a diverse community one. A nation that respects individual rights and protects individual freedom cannot be sustained if there is one standard for black and another for white; one for rich and another for poor. It can only be sustained by a single standard -- one law and one justice for all.

Americans defeated President Obama's disastrous amnesty plans both in Congressand at the voting booth. Tonight, President Obama defied an entire nation and declared that he will impose his rejected amnesty through the brute force of executive order.

President Obama's executive amnesty will provide an estimated 5 million illegal immigrants with the exact benefits Congress rejected, in violation of federal law. His order will grant them social security numbers, government-issued ID's, legal status and work permits. Illegal immigrants will now be able to take jobs and benefits directly from struggling Americans in a time of high unemployment and low wages. They will be able to take jobs from Americans in all occupations, ranging from truck drivers to power company workers to jobs with city government. Many illegal immigrants will also be able to obtain green cards and become permanent residents, allowing them access to almost all federal programs, to receive citizenship and sponsor foreign relatives to join them in the U.S.

In addition to providing formal amnesty benefits for 5 million illegal immigrants, President Obama has also eliminated virtually all enforcement with respect to the other nearly 7 million illegal immigrantsin the United States. As the president's own former ICE Director, John Sandweg said: "if you are a run-of-the-mill immigrant here illegally, your odds of getting deported are close to zero."

All you have to do is get into the country from anywhere on globe — whether through the border or by overstaying a visa — and you are free to remain, take jobs and receive benefits. This year alone, the White House has released into the United States more than 100,000 illegal immigrants who simply showed up at the border and demanded entry.

And now, with a single pen stroke, President Obama is obliterating what little remains of Americans' immigration protections. Not only will millions of low-wage illegal immigrants rush into the labor market, but they will collect billions in taxpayer dollars as well. These costly government benefits range from child tax credits, to public housing to the likelihood that amnestied immigrants will rely on taxpayers for medical and retirement benefits.

Only a short time ago, President Obama himself admitted this action would be illegal and unconstitutional: "I know some people want me to bypass Congress and change the laws on my own" he explained, adding "that's not how our democracy functions. That's not how our Constitution is written." President Obama also said that: "The problem is that I'm the president of the United States, I'm not the emperor of the United States. My job is to execute laws that are passed."

Apparently, America now has its first emperor.

And he has issued an imperial order to dissolve America's borders. Millions more will enter and demand the same amnesty benefits as those who came before. The entire moral foundation and consistency of our laws will have been eviscerated. Law enforcement officials have repeatedly warned that the president's new amnesty will unleash a "tidal wave" of illegal immigration. The impact on our jobs, wages, hospitals, schools, police departments and neighborhoods will be crushing.

A second hammer blow will be dealt by the president's unilateral increase in foreign worker programs for large corporations, including technology corporations. Currently, two-thirds of all new jobs in the IT industry are being filled by foreign workers — and yet the president wants to dramatically surge foreign worker admissions even further. This at a time when the Census Bureau tells us more than 11 million Americanswith science, technology, engineering and math degrees don't have jobs in those fields.

President Obama is auctioning off America's middle class to the highest bidders.

Immigration already stands at record levels and is rising quickly. Between 2000 and 2014 — a period during which the government issued nearly 30 million lawful visas to foreign workers and permanent immigrants — all net employment gains among the working-age went to imported labor. Now the president is planning to unilaterally increase immigration even further — all to placate a few billionaire lobbyists and open border extremists.

The great task before the nation now is to resist this imperial decree and return control of this nation to its own citizens — as our Constitution established.

That task begins with Congress refusing to allow a dime of money to be spent executing this unlawful amnesty. This a routine, constitutional and crucial application of congressional power.

If Democrat lawmakers join Republicans in blocking funds for his unlawful plan, the president will be stopped. Americans must ask their representatives this one question: do you serve the citizens of this country and their Constitution — or not?

Sen. Jeff Sessions is the ranking member of the U.S. Senate Budget Committee and a senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Such legislation has been signed multiple times and has been consistently ignored - first by the Bush administration, then by this one. Obama will NEVER enforce a sealing of the border or completion of the fence. He's ignored it for these first 6 years.

Schlafly at first considered comparing the Obama amnesty to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor but decided that Obama’s plan is much more subtle.

“With Pearl Harbor, the American people knew what was happening,” she said.

But Fort Sumter, where the opening shots of the Civil War were fired, represented the beginning of a ruinous conflict, and Schlafly, like fellow conservative luminary Richard Viguerie, speculates that an executive amnesty might touch off a sort of modern-day conflagration.

Obama plans to announce his unilateral immigration reform proposal in a televised address Thursday night. While no details are being released by the White House until then, analysts widely expect it to include delaying deportation and issuing work permits to up to 5 million people currently in the U.S. illegally.

However, it could be just the beginning. Last month, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services began searching for a contractor capable of producing up to 34 million blank green cards over the next five years.

Obama’s executive order is expected to include some parents of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents. The Washington Post reported the plan will broaden visa programs for highly skilled technology workers.

Two components of the plan would seem to appease immigration-control advocates. At the National Press Club Wednesday, Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson claimed the president’s order would include steps to secure the southern border of the United States. And “an official familiar with the administration’s deliberations” told the New York Times the newly authorized illegal aliens would not be eligible for subsidized health insurance plans under Obamacare.

Schlafly, whose recently published book “Who Killed the American Family?” came out just days before she turned 90, is not at all reassured by the latter two parts of the plan.

The Constitution designs a system of checks and balances for our nation, and executive amnesty for immigrants here illegally unilaterally decreed from the White House would seriously undermine the rule of law.

Our founders repeatedly warned about the dangers of unlimited power within the executive branch; Congress should heed those words as the President threatens to grant amnesty to millions of people who have come to our country illegally.

To be clear, the dispute over executive amnesty is not between President Obama and Republicans in Congress; it is a dispute between President Obama and the American People. The Democrats suffered historic losses in the midterm elections largely over the prospect of the President’s executive amnesty.

President Obama was correct: His policies were on the ballot across the nation in 2014. The elections were a referendum on amnesty, and the voters soundly rejected it. There was no ambiguity.

Undeterred, President Obama appears to be going forward. It is lawless. It is unconstitutional. He is defiant and angry at the American people. If he acts by executive diktat, President Obama will not be acting as a president, he will be acting as a monarch.

Thankfully, the framers of our Constitution, wary of the dangers of monarchy, gave the Congress tools to rein in abuses of power. They believed if the President wants to change the law, he cannot act alone; he must work with Congress.

He may not get everything he wants, but the Constitution requires compromise between the branches.

A monarch, however, does not compromise. As Alexander Hamilton explains in Federalist 69, a monarch decrees, dictates, and rules through fiat power, which is what President Obama is attempting.

When the President embraces the tactics of a monarch, it becomes incumbent on Congress to wield the constitutional power it has to stop it.

Congress, representing the voice of the People, should use every tool available to prevent the President from subverting the rule of law.

When the President usurps the legislative power and defies the limits of his authority, it becomes all the more imperative for Congress to act. And Congress should use those powers given to it by the Constitution to counter a lawless executive branch—or it will lose its authority.

If the President announces executive amnesty, the new Senate Majority Leader who takes over in January should announce that the 114th Congress will not confirm a single nominee—executive or judicial—outside of vital national security positions, so long as the illegal amnesty persists.

This is a potent tool given to Congress by the Constitution explicitly to act as a check on executive power. It is a constitutional power of the Majority Leader alone, and it would serve as a significant deterrent to a lawless President.

Additionally, the new Congress should exercise the power of the purse by passing individual appropriations bills authorizing critical functions of government and attaching riders to strip the authority from the president to grant amnesty.

President Obama will no doubt threaten a shutdown—that seems to be the one card he repeatedly plays—but Congress can authorize funding for agencies of government one at a time. If the President is unwilling to accept funding for, say, the Department of Homeland Security without his being able to unilaterally defy the law, he alone will be responsible for the consequences.

A presidential temper tantrum is not an acceptable means of discourse.

Of course, these confrontations are not desirable, and it is unbecoming for an American president to show such condescension towards the voters.

The American people, however, are not powerless. They have elected a new Congress full of members who have promised in their campaigns to stand up to this lawless President and stop the amnesty. We must honor our commitments.

Scott Walker is anything but bland. He has produced SPECTACULAR results in Wisconsin, of all places - the bluest of blue states. The Republican leadership ought to be crowing about his successes non-stop as a way to promote conservatism - which would win in a landslide against Hillary's same old failed BS policies that got us where we are today.

But - the Republican Leadership are a bunch of ball-less wonders who don't really care about the Constitution or conservative principles - only their continued careers and influence-peddling in Washington. So they don't talk about these things because they don't care - and the voter remains uneducated because the case for conservative principles is never made to them. It's infuriating, and it's completely reversible if the message is simply presented confidently and with the obvious and abundant evidence - irrefutable - that conservatism works every time it's tried. Screw the Mitt Romneys, Karl Roves, and Paul Ryans of the world. Inside-the-beltway establishment, clueless hacks - all of them.

It wasn’t all that long ago that the Democrats were predicting the end of the Republican Party.

With the rise of Obama, James Carville began peddling a new book “40 More Years” promising that the Dems would rule for generations.

Just this year Carville predicted that the Republican Party would become extinct if it lost to Hillary Clinton. But it was the Democratic Party that was going extinct in Carville’s own backyard.

Republicans began winning Senate seats in Louisiana for the first time in a century in just the last ten years. If Landrieu loses, then both of the Louisiana’s Senate seats will be unprecedentedly held by Republicans.

And Louisiana isn’t an outlier. Bill Clinton couldn’t stop Arkansas from going full Republican with two Republican senators and a full suite of Republican representatives for the first time in history. That’s all the more amazing in a state that only had two Republican senators before that for over a century.

The Democratic Party is going extinct in places like Louisiana, Arkansas and West Virginia. It’s vanishing because the working class White Democrat is becoming extinct.

Even Carville hedged his bets while predicting the end of the Republican Party by joining FOX News.

A generation ago, white Democrats outnumbered white Republicans. Today it’s the other way around. Under Obama, barely a quarter of white people still identify as Democrats.

Republicans didn’t just win a few elections. They swept across entire legislatures in western and southern states. They took state senates and governorships in places like New York and Illinois. It’s not that Republicans had a particularly compelling message, some did and some didn’t, but that Democrats had assumed that enough white voters would continue showing up to prop up their rainbow coalition.

They were wrong.

The latest Pew poll shows that 74 percent of Democrats support ObamaCare, but only 29 percent of white respondents do. The Democratic Party is becoming a party without white people. Under Obama, the Democratic disadvantage among white voters doubled without any corresponding gains among minority voters.

Meanwhile Republicans increased their share of white voters. And that’s only telling part of the story.

The nation’s largest party is “none of the above”. Independents began to decisively outnumber both parties under Obama. Hispanic voters are increasingly identifying as independents. So are white men.

And though the independents come from both parties, they increasingly swing Republican in key races.

The Democratic model depended on the combination of an overwhelming minority vote combined with a second place showing in the white vote. That model may no longer be feasible, especially in states with a shortage of unemployed white hipsters with PhDs and protest signs who know all the latest social warrior mumbo jumbo but can’t change a flat tire.

The Democrats had to bet on turnout and changing demographics to salvage the situation. They played up racial tensions to increase turnout and championed open borders to shift demographics and those tactics only deepened their problems with white voters.

Tribalism helped Obama win a second term, but it didn’t fix the underlying flaw in the Democratic model. And it actually worsened the situation. The more the Democrats sounded racially divisive notes, the more they alienated white voters, not just by abusing them, but by ignoring their concerns.

ObamaCare became emblematic of a party that tuned out what used to be its base. And so its base left forcing the Democrats to discover that they couldn’t actually win without white voters.

Republican congressional candidates won 64 percent of white working class voters. Landrieu won just 18 percent of the white vote; 22 percent among white women and 15 percent among white men. That’s less than the amount taken by a second Republican candidate in the race, Rob Maness.

Those numbers alone indicate why the Democrats won’t put any real money behind her. If Landrieu can’t even compete for the white vote, then there’s no reason to waste good money on her.

Mark Pryor won only 31 percent of white voters. Nunn won 23 percent of white voters. The Dems didn’t do this badly everywhere, but where they lost it was usually because the white vote sharply tilted away from them enough to offset their overwhelming minority percentages.

The Democrats have a white voter problem. The party is betting that it won’t outlast Obama because it confused its own propaganda with reality and decided that white voters hate Obama because he’s black.

It was never Obama’s race that was the problem. It was the Democratic Party’s embrace of leftist radicalism at the national level while waging identity politics wars along the lines of race and gender.

Republicans don’t have a problem with black people. Democrats do have a problem with white people.

The party is now under the sway of an elitist class of white leftists for whom “white people” is an insult, not a group of voters. And by “white people” they mean the sort of voters who conclusively tossed them out in West Virginia, Nevada and Arkansas.

The elitists of the new Democratic Party envision themselves as the white protectors and organizers of a minority country whose property and rights they will redistribute as they see fit in a new Socialist order. There is absolutely nothing in this creepy little vision that appeals to anyone except the grubby Grubers frustrated at having to work so hard to dupe the insufficiently stupid American voters who won’t just let them play with their health care toys without insisting on tediously voting against higher taxes.

It’s this elite that steadily began alienating white voters with its policies. The situation became critical under Obama not because of his race, but because he fully endorsed their insane power grab.

Now the Democrats are hoping that Hillary Clinton can save their party, but first she has to decide who she is. Hillary has tried to play up racial appeals to white voters before overcorrecting and going the other way. At times she sounds like she wants to appeal to working class voters and at other times she returns to her native element pushing the policy toys of the technocracy.

Instead of the Democratic Party’s Great White Hope, Hillary more closely resembles Mary Landrieu veering between accusations of racism and support for the Keystone pipeline. The left’s attacks on Landrieu for supporting the pipeline only highlight the impossible dilemma of any Democrat trying to run to the right of Obama and Nancy Pelosi. They have to either abandon their voters or their party.

Unlike European parties, American politicians were supposed to put loyalty to their constituents ahead of loyalty to their party. The Democratic Party put its own politicians in the impossible position of being defined by a centralized party seeking to eliminate anything reeking of conservatism while expecting them to win in conservative parts of the country. The Dems didn’t lose. They committed suicide.

The Democratic Party has moved so far to the left that it has alienated all white voters who aren’t on the left and its botched programs like ObamaCare are even beginning to alienate minority voters. Minority support for ObamaCare has hit a new low. Finding white support for ObamaCare requires a microscope.

But the Democratic Party can’t change. It has become dependent on a small donor class of men like Bloomberg, Soros and Steyer whose ad buys and think tanks dictate their agenda. To win, Hillary, Biden and any other candidate must first win over billionaires whose priorities of gun control, no pipeline and lots of big government are exactly the things that have pushed the Democratic Party to the edge.

James Carville was half-right about the 2016 election. If Hillary doesn’t win it, one of the big two parties may go extinct. But it won’t be the Republicans.

Suppose you saw a person driving his car on the wrong side of a highway, against the traffic. Would you call him a stupid and/or incompetent driver? You say, “Williams, what kind of question is that? Of course he’s one or the other!” I’d say, “Hold your horses. What are his intentions?” If the driver’s intentions are to cause highway calamity, one can hardly call his actions stupid or incompetent. Given his intentions, he is wisely acting in a manner to achieve his objectives.

This observation lies at the heart of my colleague Dr. Thomas Sowell’s column last week, in which he says, “Pundits who depict Obama as a weak, lame duck president may be greatly misjudging him, as they have so often in the past.” After suffering an elective trouncing at the polls, President Barack Obama issued Congress an ultimatum, saying that if it doesn’t enact the kind of immigration law that he would like, he will unilaterally issue an executive order to change the nation’s immigration laws. This threat, along with other abuses of his office, is not a sign of presidential stupidity or incompetence.

Obama is doing precisely what he promised during his 2008 presidential campaign, to cheering and mesmerized crowds: “We are going to fundamentally change America” and “We will change America. We will change the world.” Obama is living up to those pledges by subverting our Constitution and adopting the political style of a banana republic dictator. He showed his willingness to ignore the Constitution when he eliminated the work requirement in welfare reform laws enacted during the Clinton administration. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, was enacted by Congress and hence is the law of the land. Obama has used executive orders to change the law on several occasions. Ask yourself whether our Constitution permits the president to unilaterally change a law enacted by Congress. For a president to do so is for him to behave like a banana republic dictator.

As Sowell says, “people who are increasingly questioning Barack Obama’s competence are continuing to ignore the alternative possibility that his fundamental values and imperatives are different from theirs.”

The recent elections, which gave Republicans control of both houses of Congress, clearly indicate a repudiation of much of Obama’s agenda. But the question is whether the Republican majority has the courage to act on that repudiation and stop the president from running roughshod over the Constitution. Because Article 1 of the Constitution grants Congress the power of the purse, there is not much a president can do without a budget appropriation. The question is whether Congress has the guts to exercise its power.

We can rightfully condemn the president for picking and choosing which laws of the land he will obey and which he won’t, in violation of the Constitution’s Article 2, but is his administration’s executive branch that much of an exception to the other branches of the federal government — the legislative and judicial branches?

The legislative branch is bound by Article 1 of the Constitution. Section 8 of Article 1 delineates the scope of congressional power to tax and spend. Nowhere within Article 1, Section 8 is Congress granted the authority to tax for at least two-thirds of the federal budget.

The courts are bound by the Constitution’s Article 3. Part of the courts’ responsibility is to ensure that the executive and legislative branches of government uphold the Constitution. In that respect, the courts have been grossly derelict, particularly during and after the New Deal era.

Seeing as all branches of federal government ignore most of the provisions of the Constitution, I think we can safely say that we’ve reached the post-Constitution stage of our history. Washington politicians are not to blame. It’s the American people who’ve lost their love and respect for our Constitution. Washington’s politicians are simply the agents for that contempt.

And furthermore - I must disagree with Crafty that the Republicans "got their asses kicked" with the last shutdown. According to WHOM? Yes - obviously the establishment media did and always will blame the Republicans, but what of it? Did Republicans not just kick the Democrats' asses soundly? I fail to see the horrible consequence that followed their half-hearted shutdown. Someone please show me how that devastated the Republican Party. If they had stuck to their guns, as they need to do now, and present this as STOPPING the President from IGNORING the Constitution - fund everything else - they can make that case quite well. Taking the most important weapon in their arsenal off the table - the power of the purse - is simply moronic and ensures their defeat. Obama knows they won't impeach him - if he also knows they will back down and fund his lawlessness, there are no limits to what he can get away with. What is so damn hard to understand about this???

Matthew's piece is not a hit piece on Republicans - far from it. He's simply saying the Republicans need to stand their ground and let the blame fall where it belongs - on the Democrats and Obama. The American people are vastly in favor of stopping Obama in his tracks - despite the fact that the media - even most pundits at Fox News - don't freakin' get it! These idiot Republicans are so afraid of the media that they can't see this landslide victory right in front of their faces for what it is: an unmistakable, unequivocal mandate to STOP THE OBAMA AGENDA NOW!!!

As Matthew Vadum points out here - the last government shutdown (caused by the President, not Republicans) led to the recent landslide victory of Republicans. HOW ON EARTH WAS THAT A DISASTER THAT MUST BE AVOIDED AGAIN AT ALL COSTS??? WHAT PLANET DO THESE PEOPLE LIVE ON?

Washington Braces for Amnesty

Posted By Matthew Vadum On November 17, 2014 @ frontpagemag.com

Republicans in Congress are struggling to put together a strategy to combat President Obama’s expected unilateral immigration amnesty as the administration moves closer to pulling the amnesty trigger by year’s end.

Their deliberations came as Vice President Joe Biden met Saturday with Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina, Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, and Salvadoran President Salvador Sanchez Ceren. One of the topics was how to facilitate even more immigration from those poor Third World countries to the United States.

Biden said next month the U.S. would create what the White House called “an in-country refugee/parole program in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, to allow certain parents who are lawfully present in the United States to request access to the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program for their children still in one of these three countries.”

Although fighting President Obama’s unprecedented threatened power grab by allowing a shutdown of the federal government is a possibility, Republican lawmakers acknowledge they haven’t warmed to the idea.

“It doesn’t solve the problem,” Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, said on “Fox News Sunday.”

“But look, we’re having those discussions… We’re going to continue to meet about this. I know the House leaders are talking about, the Senate leaders are talking about it,” he said. “Republicans are looking at different options about how best to respond to the president’s unilateral action, which many people believe is unconstitutional, unlawful action on this particular issue.”

On ABC’s “This Week” House Deputy Majority Whip Tom Cole (R-Okla.) was cool to the idea of a shutdown. “I think the president wants a fight. I think he’s actually trying to bait us into doing some of these extreme things that have been suggested. I don’t think we will.”

U.S. Rep. Bill Flores (R-Texas) is opposed to a shutdown. “There’s a wide diversity of thought as to how effective that would be,” he said. A shutdown “is not a good solution.”

One of the less appealing suggestions is to sue Obama. There is a huge problem with legal standing and is it by definition an abdication of the constitutionally-stipulated power of the purse held by Congress. Lawmakers don’t have to go to court to stop Obama.

Many House conservatives want Congress to ban the funding needed to implement Obama’s executive amnesty. Others would attempt to keep the agencies implementing the amnesty on a short leash by appropriating funding for them on a short-term basis, theoretically allowing them to withhold immigration funds without shutting down the government.

“The power of the purse is what’s given to the House,” said Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.). “That’s the check that we have against the White House. To the extent that that’s the lever we have, that’s the lever we’ll use.”

Most elected Republicans still seem blissfully unaware that the the last shutdown in October 2013 was an unmitigated public relations success for Republicans even though it might not have felt that way at the time. Setting aside the relentless media propaganda that falsely painted the shutdown as a massive Democratic tactical victory, the episode sent the unmistakable message that GOPers were champions of freedom of choice in health care.

The shutdown boosted GOP public approval numbers all the way through the election this month, helped to revive the fight against Obamacare as millions of Americans were having their health insurance policies abruptly canceled, and helped to set the stage for the Republicans’ historic trouncing of the Democrats in congressional elections. The shutdown was an extended, cost-free infomercial for the GOP that reminded Americans that Republicans were on their side on an issue that mattered to them. In other words, it derailed what had seemed like an unstoppable leftist narrative that the always-unpopular Obamacare was a done deal and that resistance to it was futile.

Those gun-shy Republicans who oppose a government shutdown at all costs are never quite able to explain why, if the shutdown was so bad for the GOP, Republicans are now on the march.

On Nov. 4 the GOP flipped control of the 100-seat U.S. Senate, winning at least 53 seats as of this writing. The House GOP increased its majority, winning at least 244 out of 435 seats. In the new year Republicans will control at least 31 state governors’ mansions and at least 68 of the 99 state legislative chambers across the country (Nebraska’s legislature has only one chamber). In at least 23 states Republicans will control the governorship and both houses of the state legislature. Democrats can make the same claim about only 7 states.

Republican leaders have been talking out of both sides of their mouths on the amnesty issue for months.

Acting unilaterally on immigration would be “a big mistake” akin to “waving a red flag in front of a bull,” McConnell said. Such action “poisons the well for an opportunity to address a very important domestic issue.”

But McConnell also said he’s not willing to use Congress’s spending power to stop amnesty. Right after the election he seemed adamant that he would not abide a government shutdown.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), whose speakership is likely to be challenged by conservative lawmakers in January, also said unilateral action would “poison the well.” Boehner warned Obama, “when you play with matches, then you take the risk of burning yourself, and he’s going to burn himself if he continues to go down this path.

On the weekend Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson confirmed that planning for Obama’s executive amnesty, along with other changes to the immigration system, is almost complete.

“We’re in the final stages of developing some executive actions,” Johnson said. “We have a broken immigration system. The more I delve into it, the more problems I see.”

Of course, it is a leftist lie to say that the immigration system is broken. When progressives say the system is broken, they mean it is functioning in a less than optimal manner, failing to capture every single prospective illegal alien welfare case available to wade across the Rio Grande or walk across the nation’s largely undefended border with Mexico. To them, immigration policy is a taxpayer-subsidized get-out-the-vote scheme for Democrats and the best reform they could imagine would be to abolish America’s borders altogether.

The system is doing what it was designed to do: Flood America with people who don’t share Americans’ traditional philosophical commitment to the rule of law, limited government, and markets, in order to force changes in society. The radicals’ goal today is to use immigration to subvert the American system, just as it was in the 1960s when the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) shepherded leftist reforms of that era’s immigration laws through Congress.

The current immigration system is congested, overwhelmed, and under attack by the sheer volume of illegal aliens that Democratic policies have been bringing to the U.S. The problem isn’t so much the legal regime governing immigration but the years of non-enforcement at the border, coupled with Obama’s brazen attempts to recruit illegals from Latin America, luring them with promises of government largesse such as food stamps.

Most analysts haven’t noted that if Obama acts unilaterally on immigration, he is likely to do long-term damage to the electoral prospects of the Democratic Party. The voters of Oregon, a longtime Democrat stronghold, delivered a stark warning on illegal immigration to the president’s party in the election a fortnight ago.

Even as Oregonians easily approved Measure 91, a ballot proposition legalizing possession, cultivation, and recreational use of marijuana, and added to Democrat majorities at the state level, they overwhelmingly rejected Measure 88 which would have sustained a state law giving driver’s licenses to illegal aliens.

The vote to legalize pot was 55.6 percent in favor to 44.4 percent against but the vote to overturn the statute providing driver’s licenses was a lopsided 66.4 percent to repeal compared to just 33.6 percent to uphold the law. The statute was approved last year without much opposition by state lawmakers and signed into law by Gov. John Kitzhaber, a Democrat.

As of a month ago, the illegal alien lobby had outspent the other side by a 10-to-1 margin.

“It was really the epitome of a grassroots effort,” Cynthia Kendoll, an activist for the successful “No” side told reporters. “There’s such a disconnect between what people really want and what’s happening.”

Mark Krikorian of the respected nonpartisan Center for Immigration Studies said the thumping voters gave Measure 88 was proof that the groups supporting endless accommodations for the illegal aliens invading this country are hopelessly out of touch. “It really highlights how this issue is not a Republican-liberal issue like, say, taxes and abortion, but an up-down issue, elites versus the public.”

As if on cue, left-wing elitist Marshall Fitz of the Center for American Progress (CAP), dropped by to smear those who voted against Measure 88 as racist, monobrowed, dimwits.

“Is there an instinct toward security, hunkering down and against welcoming the other?” Fitz said. “That’s part of human nature. But that doesn’t mean instincts can’t be overcome by reason.”

Decent, patriotic Americans are infuriated by the kind of smugness and condescension exuded by open-borders radicals like Fitz and Obama who glibly equate opposition to illegal immigration to xenophobia and racism. They are intensely angered when they are told by the leftists of the media day in and day out that if you support enforcement of immigration laws you’re a bad person. The accusation grates because Americans are among the most tolerant and generous in the world, and beyond any doubt the most accepting of immigrants.

People like Fitz and his former boss CAP founder John Podesta, who is now a senior advisor in the Obama White House, seem unable to fathom just how disgusted law-abiding Americans, including legal U.S. immigrants, are by illegal immigration and the coddling and granting of special privileges to illegals.

The issue of illegal immigration isn’t a powder keg ready to blow both major political parties to bits. It’s more like a stage coach in an old Western movie loaded with liquid nitroglycerin. One bad bump on the road and — kaboom! — those guiding it across the frontier are vaporized. Obama’s hugely unpopular executive amnesty threatens to render Democrats a spent force for decades. Whether Republicans will be smart enough to stay clear of the Obama-created debacle-in-waiting remains to be seen.

Just what happened last week on election day? And what is going to happen in the years ahead?

The most important thing that happened last week was that the country dodged a bullet. Had the Democrats retained control of the Senate, President Obama could have spent his last two years in office loading the federal judiciary with judges who share his contempt for the Constitution of the United States.

Such judges — perhaps including Supreme Court justices — would have been confirmed by Senate Democrats, and could spend the rest of their lifetime appointments ruling in favor of expansions of federal government power that would make the freedom of "we the people" only a distant memory and a painful mockery.

We dodged that bullet. But what about the rest of Barack Obama's term?

Pundits who depict Obama as a weak, lame duck president may be greatly misjudging him, as they have so often in the past. Despite the Republican sweep of elections across the country last week, President Obama has issued an ultimatum to Congress, to either pass the kind of immigration law he wants before the end of this year or he will issue executive orders changing the country's immigration laws unilaterally.

Does that sound like a lame duck president?

On the contrary, it sounds more like some banana republic's dictator. Nor is Obama making an idle bluff. He has already changed other laws unilaterally, including the work requirement in welfare reform laws passed during the Clinton administration.

The very idea of Congress rushing a bill into law in less than two months, on a subject as complex, and with such irreversible long-run consequences as immigration, is staggering. But there is already a precedent for such hasty action, without Congressional hearings to bring out facts or air different views. That is how Obamacare was passed. And we see how that has turned out.

People who are increasingly questioning Barack Obama's competence are continuing to ignore the alternative possibility that his fundamental values and imperatives are different from theirs. You cannot tell whether someone is failing or succeeding without knowing what they are trying to do.

When Obama made a brief public statement about Americans being beheaded by terrorists, and then went on out to play golf, that was seen as a sign of political ineptness, rather than a stark revelation of what kind of man he is, underneath the smooth image and lofty rhetoric.

The president's refusal to protect the American people by quarantining people coming from Ebola-infected areas — as was done by Britain and a number of African nations — is by no means a sign of incompetence. It is a sacrifice of Americans' interests for the sake of other people's interests, as is an assisted invasion of illegal immigrants across our southern borders.

Such actions are perfectly consistent with Obama's citizen of the world vision that has led to such statements of his in 2008: "We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that every other country's going to say 'okay.' "

In a similar vein, Obama said, "we consume more than 20 percent of the world's oil but have less than 2 percent of the world's oil reserves." In short, Americans are undeservedly prosperous and selfishly consuming a disproportionate share of "the world's output" — at least in the vision of Barack Obama.

That Americans are producing a disproportionate share of what is called "the world's output" and consuming what we produce — while paying for our imports — is not allowed to disturb Obama's vision.

Resentment of the prosperous — whether at home or on the world stage — runs through virtually everything Barack Obama has said and done throughout his life. You don't need to be Sherlock Holmes to find the clues. You have to shut your eyes tightly to keep from seeing them everywhere, in every period of his life.

The big question is whether the other branches of government — Congress and the Supreme Court — can stop him from doing irreparable damage to America in his last two years. Seeing Obama as an incompetent and weak lame duck president only makes that task harder.

Thomas Sowell, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and is nationally syndicated by Creators Syndicate.

One is the old corrupt party of thieves and crooks. Its politicians, black and white, are the products of political machines. They believe in absolutely nothing. They can go from being Dixiecrats to crying racism, from running on family values to pushing gay marriage and the War on Women.

They will say absolutely anything to get elected.

Cunning, but not bright, they are able campaigners. Reformers underestimate them at their own peril because they are determined to win at all costs.

The other Democratic Party is progressive. Its members are radical leftists working within the system. They are natural technocrats and their agendas are full of big projects. They function as community organizers, radicalizing and transforming neighborhoods, cities, states and even the country.

They want to win, but it’s a subset of their bigger agenda. Their goal is to transform the country. If they can do that by winning elections, they’ll win them. But if they can’t, they’ll still follow their agenda.

Sometimes the two Democratic parties blend together really well. Bill Clinton combined the good ol’ boy corruption and radical leftist politics of both parties into one package. The secret to his success was that he understood that most Democrats, voters or politicians, didn’t care about his politics, they wanted more practical things. He made sure that his leftist radicalism played second fiddle to their corruption.

Bill Clinton convinced old Dems that he was their man first. Obama stopped pretending to be anything but a hard core progressive.

The 2014 election was a collision course between the two Democratic parties. The aides and staffers spilling dirt into the pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post and Politico reveal that the crackup had been coming for some time now. Now the two Democratic parties are coming apart.

Reid is blaming Obama. The White House is blaming Reid. This isn’t just a showdown between two arrogant men. It’s a battle between two ideas of what the Democratic Party should be.

Senate Dems chose to back away from Obama to appeal to Middle America. Obama wanted to double down on his 2012 strategy of energizing the base at the expense of moderate voters. Reid and his gang are complaining that Obama didn’t back away far enough from them. Instead he reminded voters in the final stretch that the senators were there to pass his agenda. Obama’s people are dismissing them as cowards for not taking him to battleground states and running on positions even further to the left.

Reid’s people think that Obama deliberately tied them to him and that’s probably true. It’s not just about Obama’s ego. His campaigns and his time in office were meant to showcase the progressive position that the only way to win was from the left. Obama and his people would rather radicalize the Democratic Party and lose, than moderate their positions and stand a chance of winning.

The left isn’t interested in being a political flirtation. It nukes any attempt at centrism to send the message that its allies will not be allowed any other alternative except to live or die by its agenda.

Obama deliberately sabotaged Reid’s campaign plans, as Reid’s chief of staff discussed, because that strategy involved disavowing Obama and his legacy. In the time honored tradition of the radical left, Obama would rather have a Republican senate than a Democratic senate won by going to the center.

Republicans benefited from a Democratic civil war. They were running a traditional campaign against a more traditional part of the Democratic Party. They didn’t really beat the left. They beat the old Dems.

The old Dems were crippled by the progressive agenda. They were pretending to be moderates while ObamaCare, illegal alien amnesty and gay marriage were looking over their shoulders. They married Obama and it was too late for them to get a divorce. And it doesn’t look any better down the road.

The Clintons became the public face of the Democrats, but instead of turning things around, they presided over a series of defeats. Bill Clinton couldn’t even save Mark Pryor in Arkansas. Not only that, he had to watch Republicans take every congressional seat in Arkansas and the governor’s mansion.

Bill had wanted Hillary to play Sarah Palin, turning her into a kingmaker and building on a narrative of female empowerment by having her back female senators. Instead Kay Hagan, Michelle Nunn, Alison Lundergan Grimes and Amanda Curtis lost. Not only did Hillary Clinton fail to deliver, but the War on Women narrative was turned inside out by the rise of Joni Ernst.

Ernst’s emergence as the definitive new senator of the election killed any chance that Democrats had of spinning the election results as sexist; even if Harkin’s Taylor Swift crack hadn’t done that on its own.

The Dems had gambled that the War on Women could offset Obama’s unpopularity, but voters were more concerned about the economy than the culture war. Not only novelty candidates like Wendy Davis, but incumbents like Mark Udall, tried for what they thought was a winning strategy. But the War on Women wasn’t a strategy, it was a fake talking point that their own consultants had forgotten to tell them was disinformation that they had created to seed the media and spread fear among Republicans.

Romney had won white women in every age group. Increased turnout by minority women had skewed the numbers, but those numbers reflected racial solidarity, not a gender gap. Progressives had not bothered to tell their old Dem cousins what they were doing. The Senate Dems marched into political oblivion by adopting the Wendy Davis platform to the bafflement and ridicule of female voters.

The War on Women meme was greeted with laughter in New York and Colorado. Senator Udall was dubbed Mark Uterus by his own supporters and performed worse with female voters than in 2008. Meanwhile in Iowa, Joni Ernst had split the female vote which Harkin had won by 64 percent in 2008.

Not only did Hillary Clinton do more damage to her brand by failing to deliver white and women voters, but the Democratic Party is stunned, confused and divided. And the damage is self-inflicted.

The Clintons thought that they could reunite a splintering Democratic Party by taking on a Republican midterm election wave. Obama sabotaged Reid to keep the Democratic Party leaning to the left. Reid is now attacking Obama openly in a way that would have been inconceivable a year ago. Obama’s people are returning the favor by going after Reid and Schumer. The war of the two parties has begun.

The old Dems have no ideas and no agenda. The progressives want to get as much of their agenda done even if it’s by executive order and even if it makes them even more unpopular than they are now. The old Dems have realized that they are the ones who will pay a political price for progressive radicalism.

And waiting in the wings is the 2016 election.

Obama has made it clear that he is willing to nuke his own party to get amnesty done. But for the first time his party seems less than eager to sacrifice its short term greed for the agendas of the left. And the only man who could tie the two wings together has emerged weakened from the Battle of Arkansas.

Amnesty promises radical demographic change, but red state Dems want to protect their positions today. They aren’t doing it for the ideology. They want to stay in office. The mutual backstabbing ended in disaster for the Democrats and there’s no reason to think that the backstabbing is going to stop.

Obama won’t just have to fight Republicans for the next two years. He’ll also have to fight Democrats.